As you probably know, DPFields is the base for the new Joomla 3.7 custom fields feature. Most of you are eagerly waiting for the migration to Joomla custom fields. So we want to explain the process and clarify the future of DPFields in this blog post.
The diff to Joomla custom fields
Since the merge of the custom fields feature in October 2016, we have been working heavily to stabilize it. During that time the community decided to skip some of the features we have already shipped with DPFields. For example the Gallery plugin is not available in core anymore or the templating functionality to render the fields inside the article description. One of the biggest changes was to move from categories to it's own entity for field groups, which do complicate the migration very much. More on that a bit later.
On the other side some new features have been added to custom fields. The biggest one is the move to fields plugins. Beside that some minor changes do have happened on the database schema and in the logic which will affect the migration path.
The migration
For a long time after the merge it looked like that the migration will just be a database table rename and all is good. But with the changes from categories to their own field groups, a lot of logic needs to be implemented on the DPFields side to make a painless migration. Not even to mention taking care of all the ACL settings. So it will take us a bit of time to make a proper migration script.
But don't worry, we will come up with a solution as we are using DPFields in production by ourselves and want to migrate to Joomla custom fields as well.
What happens to DPFields?
As we mentioned earlier, the core doesn't have the same feature set as DPFields has. So we will not shut down DPFields. We will make DPFields a product on top of Joomla custom fields with more features. This means, that we migrate the DPFields fields to com_fields fields under the hood. Additionally we have planed to offer dynamic content types and some new field plugins. All of that needs some time for development, so follow us on Twitter for latest updates. The core of DPFields will be forevere free of charge, that the users will have a painless migration to Joomla custom fields. Perhaps we will add then in the future some Pro features, but this is not decided yet.
Happy Digital Peak team
After all the positive feedback about Joomla custom fields, the Digital Peak team is very happy that we brought it into the core. It costed us a lot of energy, resources and time, but at the end we are still convinced that it was worth it. We are sure that Joomla is now on a good track and that it will help a lot of web site administrators and site integrators to spice up their site. We felt a new vibe of motivation in the community and with the plugin based approach we are sure that to Joomla eco system will come up with amazing new custom fields plugins.
So enjoy the new Joomla custom fields!
Allon Moritz
Founder of Digital Peak