ACF Chat Fridays serve as a monthly gathering point for the Advanced Custom Fields community, offering an open platform where users, developers, and the ACF team converge to explore the plugin’s ecosystem. The final session of 2025 took place on December 5th and featured a live demo of the newly released Inline Editing feature in ACF 6.7, showing how it transforms the editing experience for ACF Blocks.

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

Sign up for the next session →

ACF Chat Fridays Banner Image.

Session Recording

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

Session Summary

Phil Johnston opened the session by introducing ACF 6.7, which released on December 3rd. The centerpiece of this release is Inline Editing, a feature that allows content editors to edit ACF fields directly within the block preview, eliminating the need to use the sidebar or a separate edit form.

Phil conducted a live demo showcasing two primary modes of Inline Editing:

  • Text Editing: For text-based fields like Text or Text Area, users can click directly on the text in the preview and type changes, which automatically syncs to the ACF field.

  • Toolbar Editable: For non-text fields like Images, clicking the element reveals a popover toolbar where users can modify the field, such as swapping out an image.

The demo highlighted how easy it is to enable this feature. Developers simply need to add "autoInlineEditing": true to the acf object in their block.json file. ACF then automatically scans the render template to detect fields and apply the editing capability.

For more advanced use cases, Phil demonstrated how to customize the experience using the acf_inline_toolbar_editing_attrs() helper function. This allows developers to manually define which fields appear in the toolbar for a specific element. He showed a sophisticated example where clicking a heading allowed users to set responsive font sizes for mobile, tablet, and desktop using custom icons in the toolbar.

Other key features discussed included:

  • Block Toolbar Integration: Using the acf/block_top_toolbar_fields filter to add ACF fields directly to the main block toolbar (e.g., for layout toggles or background colors).

  • Hide Fields in Sidebar: A new block.json setting to hide ACF fields from the sidebar entirely, decluttering the UI when Inline Editing or the pop-out editor is preferred.

  • Customizable Popover Width: The ability to define a minimum width for the Inline Editing popover, useful for complex fields like Google Maps.

Q&A

Questions and answers from the session may have been edited for clarity.

Q: Can I use the WordPress icon names (dashicons) for the toolbar icons instead of custom SVGs?

A: Currently, you need to provide the SVG markup for custom icons. However, the team agreed that allowing users to simply pass a WordPress icon name would be a great enhancement and something they could look into implementing.

Q: Does Inline Editing work if I assign the field value to a PHP variable before outputting it in the template?

A: Yes. ACF scans the template for field values, so assigning get_field() to a variable and then outputting that variable will still work with the automatic detection.

Q: What does the acf_inline_toolbar_editing_attrs() function output?

A: It outputs a string of HTML attributes that are used by the block editor to identify the element as inline editable and determine which fields to show. These attributes are only present in the editor and do not render on the front end.

Q: How did you implement the responsive font size controls in the demo?

A: The implementation involved three Select fields (mobile, tablet, desktop) that output specific CSS classes (e.g., mobile-font-size-small). These classes are combined and added to the heading element. In the stylesheet, media queries define the font size for each class at different breakpoints.

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.

  • January 9, 2026

  • February 6, 2026

  • March 6, 2026

  • April 3, 2026

Tag or DM us on X (formerly Twitter) with suggestions or feedback using #ACFChatFridays.