Using standard Joomla! Form fields

Using only text input fields will work for all your projects as it is a universal way to get user input on the web. However, it will make a very bad user experience as the design will not be adapted to your data and your users will feel the pain.

In Joomla!, we can spice up our forms using several field types that provide different interfaces. This will make our forms easier to fill and our components more user-friendly.

You can find a link with all current Joomla! standard form fields and instructions in Joomla’s official documentation: https://docs.joomla.org/Standard_form_field_types.

In this book, we are going to cover the more interesting field types.

In Joomla!, all field definitions share a common structure, so a generic field in Joomla! may have these properties:

• name: This will be the name we use internally to refer to the field. It should be unique for this form, and it must be defined.
• type: This will be one...