website_urls

Widget names in Odoo view XML are keys into a registry. When the key exists, the matching component renders the field. When it does not, Odoo does not raise an error: it writes a warning to the browser console and falls back to the component registered for the field's type.

website_urls is one of those missing keys. It appears exactly once in Odoo's own source, on the URL expression field of a lead generation rule, and no module in Odoo 16, 17, 18 or 19 registers that name. The field is a Char, so what actually renders is Odoo's ordinary text input.

The result is a field that looks and behaves like a plain text box, with the placeholder from the view, and a console warning nobody reads. Everything works; it is just that the widget attribute has no effect.

The reason this page exists is that the name looks meaningful. Somebody reading Odoo's views for inspiration, or searching for a way to render website paths nicely, will find website_urls and reasonably assume it does something. Copying it into a custom view produces no error and no benefit, and the misunderstanding can survive a long time because nothing visibly fails.

There is a maintenance point in it too. A widget name that no longer resolves is exactly the kind of leftover that accumulates in long-lived customizations, usually after a module was refactored and its JavaScript removed while the view kept its attribute. Odoo's own codebase carried one for at least four versions. Auditing your custom views for widget names that no longer resolve is a cheap cleanup with a real payoff: the browser console becomes readable again.

The one core usage

<field name="regex_url" widget="website_urls"
       placeholder="e.g. /page"/>

Identical in Odoo 16, 17, 18 and 19. The widget attribute is inert; the placeholder is not.

What renders instead

<!-- effectively equivalent -->
<field name="regex_url" placeholder="e.g. /page"/>

This is what the Odoo 20 development branch actually ships: the widget attribute is gone.

If you wanted URL behavior

<field name="my_url" widget="url"
       options="{'website_path': True}"/>

The url widget is the real one: it renders a clickable link when read-only and understands site-relative paths.

The fallback is worth understanding precisely, because it is what makes a typo in a widget name so quiet. Odoo's field lookup tries the requested widget name, first with a view-type prefix and then bare. If neither resolves it logs a warning naming both the widget and the field type, then falls back to the entry registered for the field's type, and finally to a generic default field if even that is missing.

The important consequence is that a wrong widget name never breaks a form. On a Char field you get a text input; on a boolean you get a checkbox; on a many2one you get the standard relation picker. The field saves normally throughout. Only the console warning tells you anything happened, and it appears once per field per render.

In this particular case the field being decorated is a regular expression for matching website paths, used by a lead generation rule to decide which page visits it reacts to. A text input is arguably the right control for a regex, which is probably why nobody noticed for four versions.

We looked for a registration under this name in the website module's field components, in the module that uses it, and across the field registrations we could reach in each branch. There is none. On the development branch the attribute has been dropped from the view entirely, which is the tidy resolution.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. The development branch is unstable and this may still change; we re-verify the page after release.

The name is retired. On the development branch the lead generation rule view declares the field without any widget attribute, and there is still no registration under this name anywhere. So Odoo 20 simply stops asking for a widget that never existed.

The field keeps its placeholder and continues to render as a text input, which is what it was doing all along.