while working on the topic permalinks plugin, I realised that there is no way for the Administrator to add, configure or edit our new awesome custom-fields other than going into the Shell or Database and do it manually. Which makes it a quite hidden feature.
I’d propose to build a general-purpose modal-dialog similar to the administration interface listing all existing custom_fields and allowing them to be edited (and maybe other fields added) by administrators. Here is an example sketch for what this could look like for a topic:
I’d propose to make this accessible through the topic wrench per topic, the administrator-wrench per post, make it part of the category-edit page and add a button for it on the user-profile-admin-page.
Which we could do, if we make the usage of fields (at least through the editor) something plugins half-way officially register. This would also easier allow us to learn about and warn for clashes, and if we know the fields, we can do the serialisation automatically and the plugins don’t have to do the same monkey patching all the time.
I am thinking of something similar to the settings.yml, like a custom_fields.yml, which then simply would have top level sections for the models that have custom-fields support. Something along the lines of