That is fantastic, @angus. Thank you very much.
A video is always nice–I’m all for making things as straightforward as possible, but I don’t think it’s required to get the key value from these resources that @angus has put together. These resources give the code that you need to accomplish the specific goal the resource is about (having a working topic custom field or a category custom field). A video would probably just be @angus or someone else talking through how to implement the resource, but that is straightforward, and we can probably just lay it out here.
To be clear, these resources are not plugins that you just add to your site as a plug and play that customizes your forum. Rather, they efficiently give you the understanding you need to code your own custom fields in your plugin.
This is how I’ve used these resources:
You will need to add in the name and type of field that you want in config/settings. The code in these resources uses variables that are defined there. So you actually don’t need to do much customizing of the code to get it to work in your own plugin after that–the variables in plugin.rb and elsewhere refer to config/settings, and then should work.
After updating config/settings, you can just follow along with the code, adding it to your plugin:
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Start with the code in plugin.rb, and add that to your own plugin’s plugin.rb in order to create the custom field
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Then go to the initializer (at assets/javascripts/discourse/[custom-field-initiliazer]) to get the code that will initialize the custom field and allow you to save it to the server
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Then create the form in the view layer that will be where the user (or your app, if the app adds the field automatically) can enter the value for the custom field, here (assets/discourse/connectors/[plugin-outlet-name]/[your special template].hbs.
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@angus has set these up so you would add the forms for the custom fields in a plugin outlet that will be inserted in the discourse template. Settings for this form are here, (assets/javascripts/discourse/lib/[custom-field-name].js.es6, so you probably want to customize that too to make the form work.
@angus feel free to correct anything I’ve said here.
Once I got the feel for setting up the custom field by going through the steps above, I then started customizing things a bit further (for example, getting more creative with how the form works), but this was an extremely helpful starting point that saved me hours of work.
After going through it, I did have some questions (like I asked earlier), but getting responses in #dev seems like the most helpful way to go about things from there.