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 evolving ecosystem. These sessions bridge technical deep dives with practical workflows, covering topics like upcoming features, recent updates, and strategies for optimizing WordPress development with ACF. Participants gain direct access to the team behind the plugin, troubleshooting challenges and collaboratively shaping its future.

The March 7, 2025 session focused on the first release candidate for ACF PRO 6.4, refining the block editor experience, and streamlining ACF-driven development workflows.

Co-hosted by Iain Poulson, Matt Shaw, and Phil Johnston.

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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 the upcoming availability of ACF PRO 6.4 Release Candidate 1, emphasizing its critical support for WooCommerce’s High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) system. This update ensures ACF fields remain compatible with WooCommerce’s order data structure, now stored in dedicated tables.

Key upcoming features in ACF 6.4 and beyond:

  • Block Editor UX Improvements: Streamlined inline editing for fields within ACF Blocks, aligning with core WordPress block behavior.
  • Custom Icon Sets: Future updates will let users integrate custom icon libraries (e.g., Font Awesome) into the Icon Picker field.
  • ACF Block Registration UI: A new interface for configuring block.json settings directly in the ACF plugin.

The team also highlighted ongoing work to refactor block rendering, aiming for tighter integration with React and core WordPress patterns.

The session also included development workflow insights from a session participant, sharing his process for managing ACF fields via PHP/JSON files in a plugin, automating block registration, and locking down production environments to prevent accidental edits.

Q&A

We always include some of the questions and answers from the latest session, with minor edits made for clarity and style. In this case, the questions and answers have been reworded from discussions during the session:

Q: What’s the best way to structure ACF field groups and blocks in a reusable plugin?

A: Export field groups as PHP code via ACF’s Tools page, then integrate them into a plugin. Automate block registration by scanning for block.json files in dedicated folders. Use hooks to separate styling (theme) from functionality (plugin).

Q: How do you prevent ACF field group conflicts in production?

A: Disable the ACF admin interface on live sites using the acf/settings/show_admin filter. Load field groups via PHP/JSON files only, ensuring they’re read-only in production.

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.

  • April 4, 2025
  • May 2, 2025
  • June 6, 2025
  • July 4, 2025

Tag or DM us on Twitter to let us know you’ll be there. Suggest new topics, let us know what you’d like to see, and send us feedback with #ACFChatFridays on Twitter.