Creating custom field plugins

Custom fields provide you with a way to extend the functionality of Accounts, Campaigns, Contacts, Leads, and Opportunities. Fat Free CRM comes with a default set of fields for each of these entities and then allows you to effectively add your own set of fields as you see fit:

Some examples:

• You want to record a contact’s date of birth: simply add a custom “date” field called ‘Birthday’ to Contact using the admin/fields section.
• You want to add a checkbox list to a campaign to ensure that it meets a certain set of criteria.

However, you might want to add a field type that is not available in a default Fat Free CRM instance. E.g. a “file upload” or a “select list” that looks up field key/value pairs from a specified model. This guide is about showing you how to do that and walks you through how to create a custom lookup field. Code for this tutorial is located at

Getting started

Firstly, this guide assumes you have already setup a plugin and added it to your FatFreeCRM instance. If not, follow the steps in Creating a plugin before proceeding. Now, go and make a cup of tea/coffee/whatever and strap in.