First of all, congratulations everyone on Kirby 3’s release! You have no idea how existed I was when I saw the email in my inbox. You’ve all been amazing at supporting this wonderful tool and this wonderful community since V1. I’m really looking forward to using Kirby 3 in the near future and hopefully contributing in some way.
So, I’ve been reading the new docs, cookbook and references and I still find the difference between fields and sections a bit confusing. I found the “Fields vs. Sections” section in the reference, but I still find the explanation lacking.
The docs say:
As a rule of thumb field plugins should be used if content is stored in any way.
I get that, however, aren’t sections also used to save content / metadata?
Is a section more like something with multiple components working together instead of just one component?
Maybe this would help. Are there any Kirby 2 field plugins, that if they were ported to Kirby 3, should be sections instead of fields?
In Kirby 2, any Panel extensions had to be created as fields, even if they were not actually fields, but just provided some sort of general functionality, for example, the prev/next navigation for subpages had to be implemented as a Panel field, or the subpages list by @flokosiol.
Field section are the only section that store content. Pages and files section don’t store anything, they replace the K2 subpages and files in the sidebar.
For example, the Pagetable plugin, that is now a section plugin, would have to be created as a field plugin in K2.
Not only display information, for example, a files section or a pages section also has upload/create new page functionality. But uploads or new pages are of course not stored in the content file of a page. Fields sections, on the other hand, contain a set of fields, and these fields do in fact store the information you enter into the fields.
@texnixe In, Slack, there were an image posted that explained the new blueprint structure with fields, sections, tabs etc. I can’t find it, but maybe you know what image I’m referring to? Maybe you could post it here if you find it?
I have searched but cannot find it anymore. It was a drawing with boxes that explained the structure/hierarchy of a blueprint. It was really simplistic. White with blue boxes/lines. I had an aha-moment when I first saw it. It made me understand the new blueprint structure.
Yes, that was exactly the image I meant. Thanks for finding it.