One of the painpoints in any Content Management System is trying to shove a lot of data into the user interface somehow. Maybe you’ve been able to export some data from a different system, but need a way to map it into the CMS in your new project, such that you can make selections from it in your post.

How do you do that? Often, there isn’t a clear route to doing this, since many systems require massaging your data so that it fits into its opinionated framework. This isn’t always a bad thing, but sometimes you just want to side-step this and use it as-is, somehow.

Allow me to introduce to you (for the second time), the Dictionary Fieldtype - here’s the first.

Essentially, this allows us to use a file in JSON, YAML, or CSV to be the source of the field data, which fields much like a select field. Check out the docs.

Follow along as I demonstrate how you might use this to add pins to a Google Map, using JSON as the data source for the Dictionary field. Watch it here:

Not bad, eh?