Model Description

Give model designers the ability to add a short description to models so that content editors have context on how to properly use them or clarification of their purpose.

I would love more features along these lines. Communicating CMS structure to non-tech-savvy editors is a hard problem! Any help text, subtitles, some subtitle text on a collection screen, really any control over the text around models and fields that can be used to make the editor more friendly is welcome.

It would be cool if there was more distinction between field help text and validation requirement text as sometimes things get a bit lost there.

Markdown descriptives that describe fields seem applicable here and would be great if such a feature was supported but would require adjustments to their API as you’d be introducing new data.

Given that help text accepts HTML we can already support more detailed and custom descriptions on a field to field basis, for example:

I don’t know if this is the way Dato intended us to use help text descriptives but it’s one way you can leverage the CMS UI to provide better documentation of models and fields alike. Downside here is that it will precede each field but if you really wanted to hack at that you could use CSS to position the help text.

Attached is the code you’d write in the help text field:

<h1 style="font-size: 30px;">Example Title</h1>
<p style="padding:25px; font-size: 18px;font-color:pink;">
  Some text here using a style attribute to adjust the way it looks. 
</p>
<div style="border: 1px solid red; padding: 25px; font-size: 24px;">
   This content is wrapped in a div and is using the following style attribute:<br><br>
 <pre>
   <code>
      style="border: 1px solid red; padding: 25px; font-size: 24px;"
   </code>
  </pre>
</div>

Wow I had no idea you could put HTML there. Is that intended? Seems cool at first but keeping track of a bunch of inline-styled HTML across your project doesn’t scale very well. Nice escape hatch, though.