How to Create and Manage Custom Fields in Joomla 4

Custom fields in Joomla are available at a few different levels and in our case, we will use using Joomla articles to list movies and books.

We will specifically be taking a use case of imdb.com and goodreads.com and try to create a website that lists movies and books using different categories. We will try to mimic custom fields of the websites so it looks like it’s displaying all the information related to a book/movie. Design can easily be changed using CSS later on.

We will use the movie Interstellar (My all-time personal favorite) and for books, we will go with the good old, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale H. Carnegie.

Here is a quick agenda for our tutorial today.

1. Create categories
2. Create custom field groups
3. Create a custom field for each of the categories
4. Fields for movies
5. Fields for books
6. Create a new article (movie)
7. Create a new article (book)

Create categories

Now in order to create actual custom fields or articles, we first need to create 2 categories that we will assign the custom fields to and use those for creating custom fields. Let’s go ahead and create 2 categories, Movies and Books.

Go to Content >> Categories >> New

Create custom field groups

Let’s go ahead and also create 2 custom field groups for both the categories as well.

Create custom fields for each of the categories

We will be creating custom fields under each of the categories and limiting them to the field groups created in the previous step.

While creating custom fields please note:

Field Group decides the tab in which the fields appear on the article editing screen.

Category decides on what articles you are able to select/input values for the particular fields.

Fields for movies

• Name
• Year
• Photo
• Director
• Writers
• Cast
• Language
• Runtime
• Date Released
• Motion Picture Rating
• Genre

Fields for books

• ISBN
• Genres
• Cover Photo
• Author
• About the Author
• Format

Create a new article (movie)

Let’s head back to Content >> Articles >> New and select the category Movies.

Your selection should look something like this:

On the frontend it would appear something like this:

Create a new article (book)

Let’s create a new book now by clicking the new button and selecting the book category.

Your Books tab should look something like this:

And the preview should be:

This is just a small glimpse of what you can do with custom fields in Joomla 4, There are endless possibilities as to what you can and can’t do. Let us know what you created in the comments down below?