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New feature: keep your models organized with fieldsets

Posted on September 15th, 2020 by Stefano Verna

TLDR; From today, you can group the fields into your models into sets that make sense to you and your content editors. To better serve this goal, we also overhauled the model’s interface.

While DatoCMS continues to be used by more and more people, and for increasingly complex and central tasks for companies, it is not surprising that the average number of fields for a single model has increased over time.

To date, more than 10,000 models in DatoCMS have more than ten fields, and we know how much the human brain can struggle to analyze and manage objects above this number threshold without any hierarchy.

A frequency distribution histogram showing how many fields DatoCMS models tipically have

Today we are excited to release a new, extremely convenient little feature, namely the ability to group fields of a model into logical sets within the editing interface:

Fieldsets

Fieldsets help content editors better understand how the fields of the same model are connected and improve the overall scannability of the forms, defining a clear visual hierarchy:

We have made fieldsets collapsible, with the ability to show them initially hidden. The latter is an excellent choice in the case of optional fields, which do not always have to be entered:

It is important to underline that this feature is purely aesthetic: adding/modifying the fieldsets does not, in any way, alter the results returned from the API side.

A clearer UI

While we were fiddling with the schema building, we thought it would be useful to makeover the UI’s general aesthetic and feel. The new interface is easier to parse, with less clutter and more recognizable fields.

A roadmap that follows the community

This is just one of the many new features that we will roll out over the next few months, following the top rated requests within our community.

Your feedback is what helps us to continuously improve DatoCMS, making it increasingly simple, complete and versatile. We can only thank you for the attention and support you continue to show us.

Until next release (a matter of a few weeks!)