What are they?

• Extra fields are fields that are not "really" on the node as a field.
• They may or may not be editable on the actual node, depending on your desired output.
• They are easily draggable into a view mode. Which makes them easily reusable!
• Using view modes is good. It makes me happy. It used to not.

Wait, whats wrong with view modes?

Views modes are a great tool. They allow the building out of layouts that are reusable in things like views and blocks. But they can easily get out of hand. Too many view modes are hard to manage.

This should be a red flag to the UX designer. Why are there so many ways to view a single node?

There could be a necessity, but is it optimal?

Back to extra fields

Extra fields have access to the entity, so you can do A LOT of fun stuff. I have found it useful to combine fields that are editable or even building a new field.

Let's see some code

Actually, I'll be showing a DS Field.