Beginning Drupal 8

Chapter 5 ■ Content Types
Formatting the Input Form for a Custom Content Type
Sometimes you may find that the visual representation of your new content creation form doesn’t fit with
how you would like it to appear. You may want to change the order of fields on the form, the type of widget
used to create content in a field, or the format of the widget itself. To change how the form is displayed, edit
a content type following the steps you’ve performed previously. Click the “Manage form display” tab at the
top of the page, resulting in the list of fields with their widget types and widget configurations displayed
(see Figure 5-31).
Figure 5-31. The “Manage form display” tab
To rearrange the order of the fields on the form, click and hold the arrows icon next to the field you
wish to move, drag the field to the position where you want it to appear, and release your mouse button. To
change the widget type, simply select a new value from the widget select list, and to change the appearance
of a widget (for example, changing a text area so that it displays more than the default five lines), click the
gear icon in the right column (see Figure 5-31).
As an example, let’s change the text area field for driving directions from the default five lines of text to
ten lines of text. To do so, click the gear icon in the right column of the “Driving directions” field. The form
will expand to display a field where you can change the number of rows as well as enter placeholder text that
will appear in the field until the author begins entering text in that field. Change the number of rows from
5 to 10 and then click the Update button, followed by the Save button. The number of rows displayed when
creating a new event is ten, providing the author more room to enter directions.
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