ACF 6.5 Release – Flexible Content, Now Easier to Edit

Advanced Custom Fields version 6.5 is now available! 🚀🎉

This release brings a host of UX improvements to the Flexible Content field in ACF PRO – giving content editors more clarity, control, and speed when managing complex pages. As well as other improvements and bug fixes.

Flexible Content Gets Even Better

Flexible Content remains one of ACF PRO’s most powerful and widely used field types. In 6.5, we’ve focused on making it even easier to work with – especially for content editors managing large or complex pages.

Let’s take a closer look at the four new Flexible Content features included in this release.

Rename Layouts in the Editor

You can now rename each layout directly in the post editor. This doesn’t affect the layout key – it simply gives editors a way to label sections in a way that’s meaningful to them, like “Pricing CTA” or “Headphone Product Grid”.

This is especially helpful on long pages where layouts may look similar in structure but serve different purposes. It’s particularly useful when you have multiple instances of the same layout – renaming helps editors avoid confusion by clearly identifying which layout is which.

Disable Layouts Without Deleting Content

Layouts can now be disabled without needing to delete them. Disabled layouts remain visible in the editor and retain all their data, but they won’t be rendered on the frontend.

This is ideal for staging content, archiving old sections, or temporarily hiding parts of a page – all without losing work or needing to recreate layouts later.

Highlight the Active Layout During Editing

When editing a field inside a Flexible Content layout, that layout is now visually highlighted in the editor.

This gives content editors a clearer sense of where they are in the page structure – particularly useful when working with long or complex Flexible Content fields.

Collapse and Expand Layouts in Bulk

You can now collapse or expand all layouts within a Flexible Content field at once.

Whether you want to tidy up the editor view or expand everything to get a better overview, this improvement makes navigating and managing layouts much faster.

Other Improvements

Date and Date Time Picker fields now include a new option to default to the current date. This small change can help streamline workflows and reduce clicks.

We’ve also removed the use of dynamic class properties across ACF’s codebase. This eliminates PHP 8.2 deprecation warnings in development environments, making it easier to maintain compatibility with modern PHP versions.

And More

To see a full list of all the updates, take a look at the changelog.

What’s Next

The team are working hard on some major features and improvements coming to later releases of ACF. These include a significantly improved sidebar editing experience for custom fields attached to an ACF Block, and a huge improvement to how content editors can edit ACF Blocks fields directly in the block editor.

If you want to be the first to hear about pre-release versions of these new features for testing, sign up to our beta news email list.

If there’s features or improvements you’d love to see in ACF, please drop them into our feedback board and vote on others that are important to you.

Keep up to date with what we’re working on in our monthly ACF Chat Fridays office hours.

Thanks to everyone in the ACF community who helped make this release possible! 🙌

Are you excited about the new features and improvements in ACF 6.5? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter.