ACF Launches New Annual Survey

WP Engine has launched an annual survey for Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), one of the plugins it acquired from Delicious Brains in 2022. ACF reports more than 4.5 million active users, including PRO site installs, and WP Engine Product Manager Iain Poulson reports that the plugin is “growing in every way since the acquisition.” ACF has added more users, features, and releases, along with community building efforts like bi-weekly office hours.

This is the first time ACF has surveyed its user base about how they are building sites with WordPress and what can be improved. The survey starts with questions about the contexts in which professionals are using ACF and the volume and types of sites they are building. Respondents are asked about how they edit their sites, the type of license they are using, how often the reach for ACF in their toolbox, and which ACF features they use most often (i.e. REST API, ACF Blocks, Options pages, ACF Forms, Post Types Registration, etc.).

The survey is on the lengthier side with an estimated 15 minutes to complete. As ACF is a critical and indispensable part of many WordPress developers’ workflow, helping to shape its future development may be worth the time. WP Engine has also added a few questions that may only be tangentially related to ACF, such as where users are hosting their WordPress sites and what they use for local development.

“It’s our primary method for gathering insights and feedback from the WP community on what they would like to see in ACF,” WP Engine Product Marketing Manager Rob Stinson said. He also related the importance of previous customer feedback that helped ACF’s team plan and implement features like registering CPTs and Taxonomies (v6.1).

“In the near term, we’re working on bringing a UI to register Options Pages which is a PRO plugin feature, some long requested features like bi-directional relationship fields and improvements to conditional logic rules for taxonomy fields,” Poulson said. “We will also be focussing a release on more ACF Blocks features and improvements. The survey won’t likely change those planned features, and the initial results are validating our planned work on ACF Blocks.”

The survey ends May 19, 2023, and WP Engine plans to publish an aggregated and anonymized version of the results soon after the data is collected.