Custom Field Gotchas // Plasticmind Blog

Custom Field Gotchas

Consider this a public service announcement to anyone debating about using Movable Type Custom Fields for a site:

1. You cannot create system level asset custom fields. This precludes sharing asset fields across larger blog networks where global templates are used.

2. There are no formatting options for editing Custom Fields. If you’re using Custom Fields for your primary entry data (i.e. no entry body, only custom field data), be aware that they have no formatting options for the editor—it’s just an input field. You can get around this with my PlasticField plugin, but it’s not the best solution because it requires you to create a new field, doesn’t use the default editor, and doesn’t support installed format types like Markdown or Textile.

3. You cannot sort by Custom Fields despite the note about the “sort_by” attribute (below the basename) on the Create Field screen.

4. Date-based Custom Fields don’t honor the format argument. They spit out one format alone making them virtually unusable for creating neat things like iCal files (which require UTC date formatting). And a related problem: You can no longer specify a time-only field or a date-only field in 4.2.

5. When cloning a blog, Custom Field data is lost (though this seems to be fixed for the next release).

Please feel free to let me know if I’ve missed anything.

posted on 2 September 2008
by Jesse

Comments (5)
in the chapter, "Movable Type"
tagged with bugs, customfields, movabletype

InterAction:

2 September 20081. Maarten Schenk:

Funny, I just submitted a bug report about #4 not five hours ago :-)

2 September 20082. Maarten Schenk:

Oh, shoot, seems like they already fixed the bug a few days ago :-)
http://bugs.movabletype.org/default.asp?pgx=EV&ixBug=81514&=#413475

2 September 20083. Jesse Gardner:

Thanks for the feedback, Maarten!

I should also point out that Gautam Patel has a temporary fix up on the wiki for this release (4.2).

3 September 20084. Maarten Schenk:

One more thing: I got sorting by custom fields to work on a very little test set of data (three entries), so I can't claim to have done any 'deep' testing. But one thing I did notice is that you have to use just the basename, not the full 'tag' name of the field. So

sort_by="field:foobar"

not

sort_by="field:entrydatafoobar"

Don't know if this was the problem in your case, if it wasn't, please send me some details and I'll bugreport it :-)

6 April 20095. Brice Dunwoodie:

Yes, the sort_by modifier works for Custom Fields of type 'Date and Time' and I've also been able to filter items out using date compare functions like ''.

The formating problem is resolved in FogBugz, but it's not clear to me that the fix has actually been released. I'm not testing with the very latest version (4.25), but I do not see the bug ID in any of the release notes. This needs a bit more investigation.