ACF Chat Fridays are live discussions with the ACF team and community on the best ways to build sites with ACF, with insight into new features coming to the plugin.
The March 3 session included a live demo of a new feature coming to ACF: the ability to register Custom Post Types and taxonomies directly in the plugin.
Co-hosted by Iain Poulson, Liam Gladdy, Matt Shaw, Damon Cook, and Dale Williams.
Sign up for the next session →
Summary
The ability to register Custom Post Types and Taxonomies directly in ACF is one of our most requested features. Liam Gladdy of ACF ran a live demo of the new feature during the latest session, showing participants the basics of how to register CPTs in the plugin’s UI, as well as a look at the advanced settings that can be toggled on and off.
This feature is currently still in development, but the alpha version of ACF 6.1.0 is available to ACF PRO users right now through their ACF account. Exciting stuff, but please bear in mind that ACF 6.1.0-alpha1 is a developer preview. It’s primarily intended to allow users to try it out so we can gather feedback, not a full release version with all the bells and whistles. Our goal is to have a beta release ready within a few weeks, with release candidates to follow. Release notes for ACF 6.1.0-alpha1 are available on GitHub.
You can watch the demo now in the video below:
The next session of ACF Chat Fridays is scheduled for March 17, 2023, at 9pm GMT. Note that this is a change of time from previous sessions, which were scheduled for 3pm GMT, to make it more friendly to other timezones.
The demo of CPT registration was certainly the highlight of the most recent session, but every ACF Chat Friday gives you the opportunity to ask the ACF team questions about technical challenges and the best way to achieve a specific objective. We can’t fully reproduce those questions and answers here, but we’ve included a small selection below. Minor edits have been made for clarity and style.
Q: Will the ability to register CPTs and taxonomies in ACF be restricted to ACF PRO?
A: No! The free version of the plugin will also have this capability.
Q: Will CPTs and taxonomies registered in ACF save in acf-json so they can be synced to other environments?
A: Yes. Registering a CPT or taxonomy in ACF will save both to the database and to your Local JSON folder (if configured). This allows you to use ACF’s Synchronized JSON feature to sync the changes to other environments.
Q: Since you can register blocks with block-json, inside of which you can enable Gutenberg controls, such as align, text color, etc., is there any possibility that you’d add this level of functionality right into the field group and that block.json would be created for you locally?
A: We’ve discussed registering blocks with the plugin’s UI so you don’t need code and potentially don’t need to manually create the JSON file. We can’t say for sure how we’re going to do it, but it’s something we’re thinking about for sure.
Q: With Gutenberg being React, are there plans for ACF fields to eventually become React components, making it possible to code blocks via React? It would be nice to utilize some of the ACF fields in React, also without all the extra WordPress React components you need to import.
A: We’ve had a few requests along these lines. Right now, if your frontend is in React, and you’re using ACF blocks to improve the editing experience, you still need to make PHP versions of the template as well. This is not ideal. We’ve got some actual builds around what that could look like. The end goal is to give you a single React component that you render in both your headless site and backend. We still have a lot of work to do to hit that goal.
Resources & Links
We share relevant resources during the call. We’ll sum them up here and try to provide a bit of context:
Vote for ACF in Torque’s Plugin Madness
ACF 6.1 CPTs and Taxonomies Developer Preview: ACF 6.1.0-alpha1 on GitHub
Saving ACF Field Groups and Field Settings in Your Theme: Local JSON
Saving ACF Field Groups and Field Settings in Your Theme: Synchronized JSON
Coming Up on ACF Chat Fridays
Join us on March 17th for the next session of ACF Chat Fridays. This session will take place at a special time, 9pm GMT, giving more of our users a chance to participate.
What do you think we should cover in upcoming sessions? Let us know what you’d like to see on Twitter.
Sign up for upcoming ACF Chat Fridays here:
https://wpeng.in/acf-chat-fridays/
The list of upcoming sessions is below. The March 17th session takes place at 9pm GMT.
- March 17, 2023
- March 31, 2023
- April 14, 2023
- April 28, 2023
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.
About the Author
Mike is the Senior Editor of Delicious Brains. Based in Hamilton, Ontario, he has an extensive background in business-to-business communications and marketing. His hobbies include reading, writing, and wrangling his four children.