Exploring the Power of Custom Fields in Drupal: Best Practices and Real-World Use Cases

Drupal Field UI makes it easy for site builders to create custom content types and entities. With a few clicks, any citizen developer can contribute to the site’s architecture. Most sites can be created with Drupal core fields and possibly a handful of contrib modules. But how do we know when our business-needs have grown beyond the common field types? What secret powers can we unlock by creating custom fields, widgets, and formatters? And what are the trade-offs and incurred technical debt by rolling custom solutions?

This session will introduce the Drupal Field API as a toolkit for storing, managing, and retrieving data from a Drupal site. The session will consider real-world use-cases, including:

how to store multiple values or complex data into a single field,
running calculations or complicated routes as part of a field formatter,
ways to create fields that are compostable and reusable,
techniques for improving the editorial interface for complex fields, and
practical example code for creating your own fields, widgets, and formatters.
This presentation is designed for attendees in technical leadership roles. Programming knowledge is not required, however, example code and links to developer resources will be shared to highlight features of the Drupal Field API, Form API, and Drupal Console.

Participants should leave this session with an understanding of the risks and liabilities of creating custom fields, but also feel empowered and excited to employ them when they’re the right tool for the job.