Adding Custom Fields to Article Component [Not in attribs field]

Question

I am trying to save some additional fields into the Article Content and there has been a few questions like this relating to this issue but all of the solutions seem to point to saving the extra field into the 'attribs' column but since this VARCHAR column has a Length of '5120' characters; it won't be enough for what I need.

So I was trying to save into a separate table following this article but it won't work since it is also saving into the attribs column and not in the table it mentions in Joomla 3.x.

Someone asked similar question which doesn't have any answer except save it in the 'attribs' column (even with the plugin). So is there no way to save custom fields into a separate table without using a full on CCKs?

Answer 1

I would recommend using FieldsAttatch for this, see http://www.fieldsattach.com/ for more info.

It is not a full on CCK, but a much lighter system that allows you to add fields to the Joomla content model in a simple an elegant way. The fields Augment the standard joomla content fields and are just editable for the user in or more tabs.

Answer 2

I've been using FieldsAttach for this sort of thing, for a few years, the the concepts are clean and eloquent. Brian Teeman explains it well from an integrator point of view in his talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2WLKWbRj5U but in some ways it is even more compelling from a developer's perspective.

However, after watching Marco Ding's Joomla Day UK 2016 talk on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDh1IPuZAVA I think DPFields may be a better choice. The architecture is perhaps more rugged and neater, but also because it may well end up being a core extension in Joomla in the near future. More info on DPFields is at http://extensions.joomla.org/extension/dpfields , https://joomla.digital-peak.com/products/dpfields and https://joomla.digital-peak.com/documentation/162-dpfields .