With a Form created, you can now edit your data files in the Tina sidebar. Content changes are written to the files in real time. Hitting Save will commit those changes to your repository.
Tina's form hooks or components create the form based on the shape of the data. This is convenient for getting started but you will want to customize the form eventually to make it more user friendly.
Why customize the form?
label for a field is it's name.text component.How to customize the form
You can pass additional configuration options to customize the form. Refer to the Form documentation to see the entire list of form options.
Note: there may be additional properties specific to each field, but the above are the rudimentary properties of every field. Check the Fields section of the docs for particulars on the properties for each field.
Below are some basic examples of Form Configuration objects for the components used in previous examples.
import { useRemarkForm } from 'gatsby-tinacms-remark'
import { usePlugin } from 'tinacms'
import { graphql } from 'gatsby'
export default function BlogPostTemplate(props) {
// 1. Define the form
const FormOptions = {
label: 'Blog Post',
fields: [
{
label: 'Title',
name: 'frontmatter.title',
description: 'Enter the title of the post here',
component: 'text',
},
{
label: 'Description',
name: 'frontmatter.description',
description: 'Enter the post description',
component: 'textarea',
},
],
}
// 2. Pass the form as the second argument
const [markdownRemark, form] = useRemarkForm(
props.markdownRemark,
FormOptions
)
// 3. Register the form as a plugin
usePlugin(form)
return (
<>
<h1>{markdownRemark.frontmatter.title}</h1>
<p>{markdownRemark.frontmatter.description}</p>
</>
)
}import { usePlugin } from 'tinacms'
import { useJsonForm } from 'gatsby-tinacms-json'
import { graphql } from 'gatsby'
export default function Page(props) {
// Create the form
const [data, form] = useJsonForm(props.data.page, FormOptions)
// Register the form with the CMS
usePlugin(form)
return (
<section>
<Wrapper>
<h2>{data.hero_copy}</h2>
<p>{data.supporting_copy}</p>
</Wrapper>
</section>
)
}
// Define the Form Options
const FormOptions = {
fields: [
{
label: 'Hero Copy',
name: 'rawJson.hero_copy',
description: 'Hero copy for the main block',
component: 'text',
},
{
label: 'Supporting Copy',
name: 'rawJson.supporting_copy',
description: 'Choose your supporting copy for the hero',
component: 'textarea',
},
],
}After configuring the form, you should see some changes to the form & fields in the sidebar. These examples show simple field types, but there are many default field options provided by the CMS. You can even create your own fields.
You may need to implement default values or dummy files to avoid a GraphQL error when a field is empty. Next, we'll look at how to avoid these empty field errors.