Designing your fields

Fields decide what each entry in your collection looks like. A "Lawyers" collection might have a name, a photo, a practice area, a bio, and a location. You add each of those as a field, choosing the type that fits, and TribeNest gives you the right input for it when you fill in entries.

Adding a field

1. Open a collection and click Fields (or Set up fields on a brand-new collection).
2. Click Add field.
3. Enter a Label, the human-friendly name you'll see, like "Full Name" or "Practice Area".
4. Choose a Type (the full list is below).
5. Set any options and rules for that type.
6. Click Add field.

Your fields appear as a list on the collection's setup page, each showing its label, type, and any flags you've turned on. Use the pencil to edit a field or the trash icon to remove one.

The field types

Choose the type that matches the kind of information you're capturing.

• Text: short, single-line text, like a name or a job title.
• Rich text: longer, formatted text with headings, links, and styling, like a bio or a description.
• Number: a numeric value, such as a price, a rating, or a year. Can be filtered, sorted, and searched by range.
• Yes / No: a simple true-or-false toggle.
• Date: a calendar day with no time on it. Can be filtered and sorted by range.
• Date & time: an exact moment rather than a whole day, for something like a session start. Can be filtered and sorted by range.
• Select: one choice from a list you define.
• Multi-select: several choices from a fixed list you define.
• Tags: a free-form list of text labels; whoever fills the entry types them in.
• Media: an image or file. Upload a real file with a thumbnail preview, or paste a link.
• Location: a point on a map, so entries can be searched by area or distance.
• Reference: a link to an entry in another collection (see below).
• Group: a set of sub-fields kept together as one block.
• List: a repeatable set of sub-fields, where each entry can add as many rows as it needs.

Fields with a fixed list of choices

For Select and Multi-select fields, you type your options into the Choices box, separated by commas, for example Tax Law, Family Law, Criminal Defense. Those become the options people pick from when filling an entry.

Reference fields: linking collections together

A Reference field connects an entry to entries in another collection. On a "Lawyers" collection, a reference field called "Firm" could link each lawyer to an entry in a "Law Firms" collection.

When you add a reference field, pick the collection it references. Turn on Allow multiple if a single entry should link to more than one, like a recipe that references several ingredients. When filling entries later, you get a searchable picker that shows the linked entries by name rather than as cryptic codes.

Group and list fields: bundling sub-fields

Sometimes a few pieces of information belong together. Group and List fields let you bundle sub-fields:

• A Group shows its sub-fields together as one block, which is good for something like an address made of street, city, and postcode.
• A List repeats, so each entry can add as many rows as it likes. Great for something like "social links", where each row has a platform and a URL.

When you add a group or list, you build its sub-fields inline: give each a label and pick a type (text, rich text, number, yes/no, date, select, or media). Select sub-fields get their own comma-separated choices. Sub-fields are one level deep, so a sub-field can't itself be another group or list.

Field settings

Every field has a few switches that shape how it behaves. You'll see only the ones that make sense for the type you picked.

• Visibility decides whether the field ever leaves your dashboard. Public means it can appear on your site. Private means it is yours alone: it is stripped from your public site, from search, and from the website assistant, and the switches below stop applying to it. Use private for an internal note, a phone number you do not want listed, or a rate you only track for yourself.
• Title field marks this field as the entry's headline. It powers the entry's web address and its main search text. Pick one text field, usually the name or title, as your title field.
• Searchable includes this field's text when people search the collection. Available for text, rich text, and choice-based fields.
• Filterable turns this field into a filter or facet visitors can narrow by. Available for choices, references, numbers, dates, date and time, yes/no, and locations.
• Sortable lets people sort the list by this field. Available for text, numbers, dates, date and time, selects, and locations.
• Accept in submissions lets public submitters set this field when they add an entry through your submission form. See Collecting submissions.

The searchable, filterable, and sortable switches are also what you use to look through a collection yourself. See Searching and filtering.

Sections

Fill in the optional Section box to group related fields under a heading, like "Business Information" or "Contact". When you add or edit an entry, fields with the same section name are shown together under that heading, which keeps long forms organized.

Letting the AI read a field

If you've turned on your website's AI assistant for a collection, each public field also gets an AI can read this field switch, so you control exactly which parts of an entry the assistant is allowed to use when answering visitors. Private fields are never read by the assistant, whatever this switch says.

Validation: keeping entries clean

The Validation section adds rules so entries stay consistent. What's available depends on the type:

• Required: the field must be filled before an entry can be published. (Drafts can still be saved incomplete.)
• Text and rich text: set a minimum and maximum length, and optionally require the value to be a valid email address or URL.
• Number: set a minimum and maximum, and require whole numbers only to disallow decimals.
• Date and date & time: set an earliest and a latest allowed moment. Times are shown in your own time zone as you type them.
• Multi-select and tags: set a minimum and maximum number of items.

A note on keys

Each field has a short machine name shown next to its label. TribeNest fills this in automatically from the label, so you rarely need to think about it. Once your collection has entries, that machine name is locked to keep existing data lined up, so it's worth getting your labels right early.

What's next