ACF Chat Fridays are monthly open forums where the ACF community gathers to discuss various aspects of Advanced Custom Fields, including upcoming developments, recent releases, and best practices for building WordPress sites. These sessions provide a valuable opportunity for users to interact with the development team, ask questions, share feedback, and gain insights into the future of ACF.

The December 6th session of ACF Chat Fridays served as an open forum, with discussions touching on the Icon Picker field, ACF Blocks, and more.

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

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Session Recording

You can see the entire session in the player below or catch the highlights in the session summary.

Session Summary

Iain Poulson kicked off the December 6th session by introducing the team and noting work is currently underway on ACF 6.4, which includes support for WooCommerce’s High-Performance Order System (HPOS) and potential features like a new UI for registering ACF Blocks within the plugin, and inline editing for Text and Text Area fields within the block editor. The focus is on improving the editing experience for content editors, making it closer to native WordPress blocks but with additional functionality.

In addition, there was a detailed discussion about adding custom icon library support to the Icon Picker field. This is a highly requested feature, but the team acknowledged potential implementation challenges, such as pagination and search functionality within large icon sets.

The discussion around possible improvements to the Icon Picker field was not restricted solely to icons. It was noted that the same idea could be used as a sort of “media picker,” allowing content editors to choose from a pre-selected array of images, audio clips, etc.

Q&A

We’ve included some of the questions and answers from the latest session below. Minor edits have been made for clarity and style.

Q: Are there still plans to add custom icon library support to the Icon Picker field?

A: Yes, there are plans to support custom icon libraries. The team is working on making it easy to pass a custom icon set through a filter, creating a new tab within the Icon Picker similar to the Dashicons tab.

Q: How can I build ACF query blocks or use ACF Blocks within query loops?

A: You can create an ACF Block that retrieves fields based on the context provided by the query loop. Alternatively, you can write PHP to query the post type and render the fields within a block template, ensuring design control while allowing editors to place the block as needed.

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 3, 2025
  • February 7, 2025
  • March 7, 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.