Flexifield

CCK on Drupal 6 is awesome. You can create multi-valued fields, and re-order the field items with drag-and-drop. However, each item in the field is constrained to be of the same type (e.g., text, date, etc.), and creating a new type requires coding by a developer.

Flexifield tries to get around both limitations by letting you create combinations of fields and then use that combination as items within a larger field. You define a field combination by creating a node type and adding fields to it. On a different node type, you can add a flexifield, and then on its configuration form, specify which node types to use as items within the field.

Status of this module: I've been remiss in maintaining the module for the past few months, but I'm starting that up again. There's a backlog of issues to work through and I appreciate everyone's patience while I slowly catch up. Meanwhile, some excellent work is continually being done with CCK Multigroup, and bjaspan has started on a promising project, Combo Field, for D7. Two features that flexifield has that multigroup doesn't have is the ability to have a multi-valued field inside a multi-valued flexifield, and the ability to create a flexifield that uses more than one content type for each flexifield item. Because of this, I plan on continuing flexifield development for D6. If Combo Field for D7 does everything that flexifield does, I will not port flexifield to D7, but will instead work with Barry to provide an upgrade path from flexifield to combofield. If Combo Field takes an architectural direction that's incompatible with some of Flexifield's features, then I will have a D7 release of flexifield by the time D7 is released.

Road map: See this issue.

Upgrading from a version prior to alpha5 to alpha5: Make sure you've upgraded to CCK 2.3 or later prior to upgrading to Flexifield alpha5.

Integration with other modules:

• This module has a dependency on the ahah_response module.
• Alpha 5 of this module requires CCK 2.3 or later.
• Alpha 5 of this module has Views integration. See this issue for details.
• With alpha 5 of this module, you can use file fields within a flexifield, but you need to use version 3.1 or later of the FileField module, and you will need to enable the "FlexiField FileField Integration" module (included with the download of flexifield).
• If you use the Wysiwyg API module on textarea fields, and you need the "add another item" or drag-and-drop features of CCK to work for those textarea fields, you will need the Wysiwyg API CCK Integration module. You may be interested in these modules even if you're not using flexifield, but simply want wysiwyg editors to work on regular multi-valued textarea fields.
• If you set a flexifield field to use multiple content types for its items, and if one or more of the fields within one of those content types requires javascript or css files to be loaded for the widget (field editing form) to function (the FileField module is an example), you will need the ahah_script_ensurer and ahah_style_ensurer modules.

General caution about using pre-release modules: I'm very grateful for everyone who's been using the alpha versions of the flexifield module, and participating in the issue queue. Without your continued support doing that, this module will never make it to a stable 1.0 state. At the same time, I want to make sure to warn people thinking of using this module that alpha means this module is still in heavy development, and has not yet been widely tested. It is in-use on several live websites, but consider this warning carefully before using it on your own website.