Nested Blocks

@simon and @shannon we know that this feature it’s very important to many of you.

Unfortunately this is a complex task that would affect many areas of our codebase, as you can imagine, and we cannot take this right now.

In our latest blog post: https://www.datocms.com/blog/retrospective-what-happened-in-q4-2019-future-plans we mention our roadmap for the near future.

Mainly we are keeping things simple as we are in a phase of company changes (setting up a new company, hiring a new dev) which force us to be cautious about the next few months.

But then, once we are all settled and the team a bit grown, we’ll surely tackle this one!

We are very sorry, but we hear your voices, we’ll get back to this task and be in touch.

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Yikes, sounds like we may need to stick with WP + ACF for headless for the time being then.

if nested modular fields are a must I’m afraid yes :frowning:

This is one feature that I really miss in DatoCMS. :heavy_plus_sign:
Especially when it comes to accordions and columns of lists.

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It’s certainly understandable that this is a difficult feature to build, but I’m glad to add another +1 if it matters. I’m heading up a project whose architecture would be massively simplified by allowing modular content nesting. This would be a great “Long term” win!

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+1, looking forward to this feature as well

+1 – also very much looking forward to seeing this implemented!

+1 would be great to have it

+100, This is something that I think makes Dato really lacking, it would be good to get an update on the progress of this feature!

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we know this is still the top requested feature, but we are not sure yet when we can start working on it. Probably later this year, but we haven’t planned that yet! We’ll let you know of course, as soon as we start developing this.

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Hi there, I’d like to add my support for this feature as well.

Perhaps another way to look at this is to reflect on who actually is the end customer for these CMS products.

As developers, we choose the platforms that have the best tooling, but our clients (the “content editors”) are the ones who actually dictate the feature requirements.

In our experience implementing other headless platforms (Contentful, Prismic, Wordpress), the one feature requirement that keeps coming back is layout and module flexibility.

Our clients want to feel like they can reuse anything we’ve built for them, in any context. Whether they actually do, is almost irrelevant.

Another thing to consider is the unique advantage it could give your platform vs the competition. Out of all the CMS platforms we evaluated in the past, including the ones mentioned above, the only one we found that does nested modular content well is Wordpress + ACF.

Perhaps it’s also worth considering the strategic advantage of being the only non-Wordpress CMS that can also do this.

Anyway, thanks for even having a platform where your users can share their feedback. We’re a paid tier user now and excited to see what’s up ahead for this platform.

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Checking in to see if this is on your radar at all? I usually manage to find a work around to avoid the need but I am stuck.

Specifically i need a user to be able to create page sections, of different colors, filled with modular fields. I was going to simply have a “Section” modular filed and have a user insert that to being a section, but doing something like this in react is impossible because you can have open tags in JSX. Anyone got a hack?

hey @powerboard, in short yes!

This is surely on our radar. We are actively working towards this, but it means a series of non-trivial changes both in our API and in our CMS UI. I really hope that this together with the other highly requested features are going to come out in the next 6 to 12 months, surely something before, but we don’t yet have enough visibility on that. As soon as we plan things out we’ll give you an update.

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A similar feature was requested by a Contentful user 3 years ago…they don’t appear to be implementing it.

Great to see this is (potentially) on the roadmap. I have just switched to Dato from Contenful, and am looking forward to using it!

Edit: I’m realizing the feature I linked is already included in Dato. Amazing!

This would solve so many inconveniences!

+1, this is essential to the site I’m building now, scratching my head about maybe solving it through Links and top-level Models? Not sure if it will work.

If it helps, I too am just on the “Repeatable/Repeater” train, full nested blocks would be overkill.

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+1 , repeatable solution is needed

+1 Very much desired

Update: using Links and a new Model works great as a repeatable/repeater workaround. The only downside is that you get a large collection of fragment records, best to ignore them.

The main place we hit this was allowing for arbitrary rows of columns in a blog post. The “column row” is a content block type, which links to a separate “column” model.

Editing experience
Not too shabby, though the extracted preview data isn’t always great (I wish it also pulled multi-line text). Nested editing modals are amazing though, for creating new columns in situ, and the drag-and-drop to rearrange is nice.

Pile o’ fragments
The downside is this long list of columns from across every blog post, not useful for much on its own. We don’t link to it from the sidebar, but editors can stumble across it if they click the “From library” button on the column row modular block links field.

Final result
Very nice! Client loves the flexibility of column rows (+ being able to specify special column sizes; we’re using Bulma for CSS so we just allow them to pass through size modifiers via a simple text field).

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Also—we haven’t tested this—but our Column model contains its own set of modular blocks… So if we allowed a Column Row to be nested in a Column, seems like you could have infinitely nested modular blocks?

In which case, a separate model could be a full workaround for any nested modular field needs.