Link Field improvements - add settings for a custom link text and a toggle to open in a new window, add the ability to set default link type #15686

nikolenko-dmitriy · 2024-09-06T11:16:00Z

nikolenko-dmitriy
Sep 6, 2024

We tried to use native Link Field instead of Typed Link Field plugin and came to the conclusion that the logic with combining Link Field, plain text field Custom link text and lightswitch Open in new window into one matrix field is too complicated.

The reason is that there is too much to do if we need, for example, 5 link fields with their own unique settings.
For example, the list of allowed link types for them should be different.
In this case we can re-use only plain text field Custom link text and lightswitch Open in new window.

But we will also need to do the following:

create 5 unique link fields
create 5 unique matrix fields, that will relate to the appropriate link field
create 5 unique entry types that will be used for the appropriate matrix field
configure eveything in the control panel and re-use plain text field Custom link text and lightswitch Open in new window

It would be great if we could create just 5 unique link fields and not have to create matrix fields and additional entry types.

There are 2 suggestions how to improve this:

Add the ability for the native Link Field itself to have settings Custom link text and Open in new window
If the previous way doesn't work for you, would it be possible to add some new UI Element to the Field Layout to group fields into one box? I mean instead of adding a matrix field we could add Link Field, plain text field Custom link text and lightswitch Open in new window separately but visually it should be clear for the user they refer to the same thing. Below is the example of what we tried to do:

Another request is to add setting Default link type when configuring Link Field. Currently, the first option from the drop-down list is always selected by default.