7 Aug

ACF PRO 5.9 RC1

By Elliot Condon

ACF PRO 5.9 RC1 is now available for download 🌈☀️! This includes all the highly anticipated updates shown in our ACF 5.9 – Exciting new features announcement.

To access this release, please login to your store account and select this version from the available downloads shown on the Licenses page. Users who already have a beta version installed will find an automatic update available via the Plugins admin page.

👨‍💻 Please find the release notes below. And for the latest ACF news, follow us on Twitter @wp_acf.

A new help tab

Since rolling out the new Field Groups admin page, we have had the intention of implementing a “Help” tab to provide a space for information, assistance and plugin details.

You may have noticed this tab existed as an empty placeholder. Well, not anymore! We’re really glad with how this came out, and hope you are too.

Tweaked alignment

After adding two new ACF Block settings for text and content alignment, we have continued fine-tuning the API for the best developer experience. This release includes a minor teak to the “align_content” flag which we believe will offer more consistent experience for users updating across different WordPress versions, and also provide a more future proof API to work with.

Previously, setting  "align_content" => true would tell ACF PRO to choose between the Matrix Toolbar or the Vertical Toolbar options (in that order) based on the WordPress version installed. This behavior has been tweaked to now always default to the Vertical Toolbar, making the Matrix alignment option an opt-in feature.

Specifying the Matrix alignment option is simply done by the "align_content" => "matrix" flag.

JSX !== experimental

From 5.9.0-RC1 onward, the “__experimental_jsx” flag needed for <InnerBlocks /> support is now simply “jsx”. This feature has proved itself to be far from experimental since its debut in 5.9.0-beta1, but we are glad to have erred on the side of caution. Our beta testers don’t need to worry about breaking changes here – we added in a compatibility layer to handle the naming change, but encourage all developers to use the new syntax going forward 👍.

Other enhancements

  • Minor CSS improvements for new WordPress 5.5 styles.
  • Fixed bug causing import to fail on new Local JSON files.
  • Fixed bug preventing the bulk actions drop-down from appearing when viewing “sync” tab.
  • Added backwards compatibility for acf()->json access and deprecated methods.
  • Muted console warning when Block category does not exist.

 

🙌 Thanks to everyone who helped make this release possible. We are only weeks away from launch 🚀! Think you’ve found a bug? Please post in detail a new support ticket.

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