Link Field

[romainmenke]

Hi 👋

We are trying out Meta Box and noticed that the link field (or an equivalent) isn't available.
We use this field extensively in ACF and really like it for:

• having separate sub fields for title, url and target
• having autocomplete that searches through the content of site and suggests possible links

A built-in/dedicated field would also a nicer UX for content editors.

We fully understand that this isn't a trivial feature and that a combination of other fields can be used instead.

Is there an option to financially sponsor work on such a field?

[rilwis]

Hi @romainmenke ,

Can you just use the post field to link to a post? Or if you just want an arbitray link that doesn't attach to a post, then use a URL field (and maybe a text field if you want it for the anchor text).

Things like _target, title depends on how you output them on the front end.

[romainmenke]

Hi @rilwis,

Thank you for taking the time to respond to this issue 🙇

Using the post field implies that content editors can only link to internal content, and not to something on another site.

The post field does have the right UX, it allows content editors to search through existing content and link to that. While searching through content is lacking in the URL field.

The URL field gives more freedom to enter any url, but it is lacking config for text content (typically named title in a CMS but not necessarily rendered as the title html attribute, I'll refer to this as "text content" from now on) and the _target.

The text content and _target can't be hard coded. They depend on content. So we need to add fields for them.

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To achieve something similar to the link field from ACF we need to add slightly convoluted conditional fields in metabox.

We need to add a select, giving users the choice between either linking to a post or entering a manual url.

And then we need to add extra fields for custom text content and the _target.

This kinda gives us what we want:

• ability to search through content and link to it
• ability to enter any url
• custom text content
• configurable _target

Given how many of these we need to add and configure per project it will cost us a lot of time and the result isn't that great. A dedicated field would be more polished and have better UX for content editors.

It also costs us more time and effort in templating as the data isn't uniform between a url field and a post field.

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The issue isn't that something isn't possible today :)
But the lack of a dedicated link field costs us time and complicates each project.
Exactly because of this we are willing to sponsor the addition of such a field.