ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) version 6.1 was released this week with support for creating Custom Post Types and Taxonomies. This is a long-awaited feature that users have been asking for since the earliest days of the plugin when it was still developed by its original author, Elliot Condon.
When Delicious Brains acquired the plugin, the ACF community reiterated this feature request. WP Engine kept it on the roadmap when they acquired ACF in June 2022 and has finally been able to deliver. Registering post types and taxonomies is now available through a simple interface that works in a similar way to creating field groups and fields.
After registering the CPT, users can then add an existing or new field group for it or create a taxonomy, and move on from there. The advantage is that users don’t have to break their workflows and use a different plugin for this functionality. For those managing client websites, it is one fewer plugin required.
“We know there are a large number of ACF users registering custom post types (CPTs) and creating custom fields for them,” WP Engine Senior Product Manager Iain Poulson said. “But they have to register the CPTs either manually with code or using another plugin. The overarching workflow of modeling the data needed for a site build is fragmented between different plugins, UIs, and user experiences. We wanted to fix that!”
The ACF development team has also created a dedicated import tool for users who want to migrate post types and taxonomies from the Custom Post Type UI (CPTUI) plugin to ACF in order to manage them all from one plugin. ACF has also built in the ability to disable post types and taxonomies from the plugin admin in case users do not require this feature in the update.
ACF reports more than 4.5 million users, so it will be interesting to see how having this built in will impact the CPTUI user base, which is active on more than a million websites. Some users simply need custom post types but won’t require all of ACF’s capabilities, but there is certainly a large overlap between the two plugins.
After expanding well beyond the creation of custom fields with this and previous updates, Poulson said they will be referring to the plugin as “ACF” more going forward. The plugin’s admin sidebar menu has been updated from “Custom Fields” to ACF.
Version 6.1 also includes the following highlights and important changes:
- New ‘browse fields’ button opens a modal to search and showcase all field types
- Post Object, Page Link and Relationship fields now support filtering by post status
- Full compatibility with PHP versions 8.1 and 8.2
- New option to filter field settings tabs so other plugins can add custom tabs and arrange their fields
- Security fix backported to ACF 5.12.5 for a security issue where ACF might unserialize maliciously manipulated data which instantiates a class
All of these new features are available in both the free version and ACF Pro. Check out the changelog for the full rundown of everything included in version 6.1.
As the long standing primary developer of Custom Post Type UI, I stand proud of mine and WebDevStudios’ ongoing commitment to portability and ease of use of content types. Whether it be through CPTUI, Advanced Custom Fields, or a quick copy/paste into a functions.php file, I want your website to succeed as much as possible with your goals.
No one should be locked in to one specific content type register-er.
Now…to see how ACF saves their settings and how easy it’d be to move from ACF to CPTUI…must tinker.