Introducing automatic fields

Automatic fields are a feature to help reduce content duplication, increasing efficiency for content creators.

The purpose of automatic fields is to allow those designing the data model to express their rich models without placing an additional burden on content creators.

An example of where automatic fields are useful could be in a blog post data model. To richly express your data model you may have: title, alias, metadata title, OpenGraph title (slightly redundant, but helpful to illustrate the point).

Before automatic fields, content creators would need to populate the entry name, along with those 4 fields.

With automatic fields, they simply need to specify the entry name and the rest will be filled in automatically.

You can also apply simple transforms to these fields, in the case of the alias (used for the URL), the entry name can be transformed using the "Slugify" transform that would convert "Introducing automatic fields" to "introducing-automatic-fields".

At the time of writing, there are 4 options for the source of automatic fields.

1. Entry name
2. Entry creation date
3. Entry modified date
4. Another field - this allows you to specify another field to read the value from

For now, you are not able to "chain" automatic fields, that is - one automatic field is not able to read its value from another automatic field. If this sounds like something you would like to see in Pokko, please let us know!