8 Feb

ACF Chat Fridays: February 3, 2023

By Mike Davey

ACF Chat Fridays are open office hours with the ACF team and users, featuring live discussions of all things ACF, answering your questions on building sites with ACF, getting the most out of your fields, and what’s next for the plugin.

Co-hosted by Iain Poulson, Liam Gladdy, Matt Shaw, Anthony Burchell, and Brian Hardie.

Sign up for the next session →

ACF Chat Fridays Banner Image.

Summary

We held our first-ever session of ACF Chat Fridays on February 3rd, 2023. The open forum proved popular with users, as they took the opportunity to ask questions regarding the coming introduction of custom post type and taxonomy support, improving performance on Repeater fields with pagination, changes to the way shortcodes work in the block editor, and much more.

The session started with a “getting to know you” poll that highlights the variety of ways you can build with WordPress, supported by ACF. Please note that participants could select more than one option.

A poll showing what types of sites participants build with ACF. ‘Classic WordPress’ - PHP themes, 54%. ‘Block Based’ - Using the block and/or site editor, 43%. ‘Page Builder’ - Using a page builder, e.g., Elementor, 31%, ‘Headless WordPress’ - Using WordPress with a headless frontend, 15%, Other, 4%.

There were far too many questions during the session to sum them all up here, but we’ve included a few below. Minor edits have been made for clarity and style.

Q: Is there any fear ACF Flexible fields will no longer be supported in the near or distant future as WordPress moves towards full site editing?

A: Not at all. We’re not going 100% blocks. There are many ways to WordPress, and ACF serves them all.

Q: I recently had some performance issues with an ACF repeater with around 200 records. It caused the page to be so slow on save that it was unusable.

A: We recommend enabling pagination for Repeater fields that store large amounts of data. This feature was introduced in ACF 6.0. Aside from enabling pagination, turning off revisions (or limiting the number of revisions that can be saved) can help a lot as well.

Q: Now that ACF is owned by WP Engine, is there any intent to tighten up the functionality between it and Apollo/Faust.js in order to more easily build headless WordPress sites?

A: There is! First, we’re going to work on adding ACF to Atlas Blueprints. Second, Jason Bahl is working on updates to the WPGraphQL for ACF plugin that should bring improvements when it comes to integrating ACF and WPGraphQL.

If you’re working with ACF and headless, we definitely recommend checking out the Headless WP Discord for extra support.

Resources & Links

We share relevant resources during the call. We’ll sum them up here and try to provide a bit of context:

What’s Next for ACF Chat Fridays?

We haven’t finalized our topic list yet, but you can help! Get in touch with us on Twitter and let us know what you’d like to see for upcoming sessions.

Sign up for upcoming ACF Chat Fridays here:

https://wpeng.in/acf-chat-fridays/

Here’s the list of upcoming sessions. All calls are at 3pm GMT:

  • February 17, 2023
  • March 3, 2023
  • March 17, 2023
  • March 31, 2023

Let us know you’ll be there by tagging or DM-ing us on Twitter, @wp_acf. Keep up with the latest topics and send us feedback with #ACFChatFridays on Twitter.

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