One of Joomla biggest problems (and one the reasons I’m slowly moving away from Joomla) is that there is only one content type. If you need anything else than a basic article you have to find, or write, an extension  – not the most flexible way to handle content.

WordPress, which in it’s later incarnations works pretty well as a CMS solved a similar problem with a mechanism called “custom fields”. For any article you can store additional info as key/value pair in the database with the post id as an identifier. If you use a plugin like the fantastic “more fields“-plugin you can even define arbitrary content types with additional editor fields, dropdowns etc.

I wonder if there is something similar for Joomla. I found two Summer of Code-Projects for custom content types that both seem to go nowhere (come to think of it, I can’t remember any Joomla related SOC project that produced a stable extension) and there is pages-and-items which, judging by  the raving reviews, seems to be a fantastic piece of software but which apparently breaks with the standard Joomla interface and introduces it’s own page-tree view (not a disadvantage of course, it just seems it’s a lot more than I need).

I think it’s strange that Joomla did not introduce a custom fields mechanism with 1.5 – after all, the necessary infrastructure with hooks and triggers is already in place. So it should be possible to insert custom fields in the content manager, save key/value pairs with an onSave trigger and pull them from the database and format them according to a given templat (maybe with a component to create fields and templates?) with a plugin on display.

This seems so straightforward that I can only think that either a (working and mainained) extension like this is already there and I didn’t see it or that items-and-pages is already the best possible solution and there is no need for a more simple extension ( I can exclude the possibility that nobody actually wants custom fields – I know a lot people who do).

I would be quite interested in you opinion on the matter.