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.
Forest Mars
Surprised you didn’t mention Form2Content which was actually the first such extension released for Joomla! As for the latest and greatest, have you seen Jseblod cck? Despite the funny name it offers a lot of custom field functionality, maybe too much in fact, but it’s feast or famine apparently.
It also lets you create content packs for importing/exporting/sharing the custom field schemas you’ve created which seems super keen as well.
ps, thanks for infinitely useful”place here”!
Forest Mars
dains
Yes, I’d like different article types, so that I can call them to the interface and present them to users in separate groups.
Eike
Thank you for the link! – I just watched the video and that looks amazing indeed.
error4o4
I never tried it, but apparently K2 is what you are looking for.
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/core-enhancements/content-management/8061/details
http://k2.joomlaworks.gr/
http://k2community.joomlaworks.gr/