The latest session of ACF Chat Fridays brought the community together for a detailed breakdown of the 2025 ACF Annual Survey results. The discussion also included a discussion of the recent enhancements in ACF 6.5, as well as the key trends shaping the WordPress development landscape, from block adoption and AI usage to developer workflows and tool preferences.

Hosted by Iain Poulson, Matt Shaw, Phil Johnston, and Anthony Burchell.

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Session Recording

Watch the full session below or skip to the highlights in the session summary.

Session Summary

Iain Poulson opened the session by announcing that ACF 6.5 is officially released. This release brings enhancements to the user experience for the Flexible Content field in ACF PRO, with four key improvements: the ability to rename layouts, disable layouts without deleting them, a focus mode for easier navigation, and buttons to expand or collapse all layouts at once.

Looking to the future, the team is hard at work on ACF 6.6, which will introduce ACF Blocks v3. This is a foundational update aimed at improving compatibility with modern block editor features and solving longstanding issues like iframed blocks. Following that, future releases are expected to deliver the highly anticipated inline editing feature for ACF Blocks.

The main segment of the session was a deep dive into the results of the third annual ACF survey. Key insights from the 2025 report include:

  • WordPress Usage: Hybrid themes remain the most popular way to build sites, while classic themes are still used by a significant 47% of respondents.
  • Support Satisfaction: User satisfaction with ACF support has seen a major increase, rising from 73% to 81% in the last year.
  • ACF Blocks: Adoption remains strong, with half of all respondents who use the block editor choosing ACF Blocks to build their custom blocks.
  • Popular Field Types: The top four most-used fields remain Text, Text Area, Image, and the powerful Repeater field.
  • AI in Development: A new question this year revealed that a majority of developers are using AI for tasks like writing code and generating content.
  • Developer Workflows: While 60% of users manage their code with version control, FTP remains the most common deployment method, also at 60%.

The team emphasized that while the public report focuses on statistics, the qualitative feedback provided in the survey’s free-form answers is critical for shaping the product roadmap. You can see more results from this year’s survey here.

Q&A

Questions and answers from the session have been paraphrased for clarity.

Q: Can you show the progress on the inline editing feature for ACF Blocks that was previewed a few months ago?

A: Inline editing is slated for ACF 6.7, which will follow the release of ACF 6.6 (ACF Blocks v3). While the user experience will be the same as what we’ve previously demoed, there is no new visual progress to show at this time. The team’s current focus is on the extensive “under the hood” work required to ensure the feature is stable, backward-compatible, and handles all potential edge cases. We are working to make it a solid, opt-in feature that works well with existing workflows right out of the box.

Resources & Links

Coming Up on ACF Chat Fridays

Register today for the next session of ACF Chat Fridays. Sessions are typically held on the first Friday of every month. Questions and suggestions for the development team are always welcome.

Register for the next session of ACF Chat Fridays here: https://wpeng.in/acf-chat-fridays/

The list of upcoming sessions is below.

  • October 3, 2025
  • November 7, 2025
  • December 5, 2025

Tag or DM us on Twitter with suggestions or feedback using #ACFChatFridays.