Advanced Custom Fields plugin Review

Advanced-Custom-Fields

BuddyPress is a large community plugin with lots of great features. People can connect with each other very easily, having different mindset, terminology and perspectives. Keeping that in mind, fields play an important role in storing different kinds of information about users, posts, pages and many more. But unfortunately, the fields provided by WordPress are limited and only allows users to fill relevant information. There are no options to add custom fields for WordPress components to get the information about what an admin may like to know, such as Location or Address in Post.

Advanced Custom Fields plugin allows to add as many custom fields to the components as the admin wants. The plugin has tons of different field types and options to customize and display the field in components. You just have to add a new field group, add some fields into it, select the location to display and save.

Features:

  1. Powerful Custom Fields
  2. Simple, Intuitive and Easy to Use
  3. Over 30 Field Types
  4. Well Documented
  5. Great Support

Advanced Custom Fields In-Depth Review

ACF Settings

The plugin offers a bunch of options to tweak in the custom fields and also allows you to add new field groups. The settings are located in wp-admin > Custom Fields.

Field Groups

Here, you can see and manage all the custom fields created. You will be able to edit them, duplicate them or delete them right from the list.

field group

Add New Field Group

In the Add New section, you will be able to add new field groups and fields assigned into them. These fields assigned in the field group have the settings to be displayed in a specific location or components. Let’s take a quick look at the Field Group Settings and other options.

  1. At First, you would see the title and then the option to add fields into the field group. You can add as many fields as you want. The field group will not appear if you don’t add any fields.
  2. In Location, you will be asked to add a rule for where to display the field group. The rules can be multiple and you can display the field group at multiple locations. Following are the list of display locations:
  1. Post Type
  2. Template
  3. Status
  4. Format
  5. Category
  6. Taxonomy
  7. Post
  8. Page Template
  9. Page Type
  10. Page Parent
  11. Page
  12. Current User
  13. Current User Role
  14. User Form
  15. User Role
  16. Taxonomy
  17. Attachment
  18. Comment
  19. Widget
  20. Menu
  21. Menu Item

3. In Settings, there are various following customization options you can change:

  1. Active: Mark the field group status as active.
  2. Style: The field group will be displayed in a meta box or full width.
  3. Position:  Position the field group, after the content/title.
  4. Label Placement: Change the label placements between front or top.
  5. Instruction Placement: Change the description or instruction placements.
  6. Order No.: Assign an order number for every field group to display on top and sequence.
  7. Description: Used to display field group description.
  8. Hide on Screen: Here, the checked options will be hidden from the particular location where the field group will be displayed.

add new field

Add New Field

While adding a new field, a new collection of options will appear for field specific only. The fields will be shown under a specific field group, location and rules. The following options can be tweaked as per user preferences:

  1. Field Label: Name for the field to display.
  2. Field Name: Same as the Field Label but not editable.
  3. Field Type: There are various Field Types provided by this plugin, even more than WordPress default. Some of the field types are as follows:
  1. Text
  2. Text Area
  3. Number
  4. Range
  5. Email
  6. URL
  7. Password
  8. Image
  9. File
  10. WYSIWYG editor
  11. oEmbed
  12. Select
  13. Checkbox
  14. Radio Button
  15. and many more…

4. Required: Mark the field as required or not.

5. Default Value: Assign a default value to field, editable later on.

6. Placeholder Text: Show a placeholder text in the field.

7. Prepend/Append: Add custom input automatically before or after the values.

8. Character Limit: Limit the field value characters to some extent. Also leave blank for no limit.

9. Conditional Logic: Add custom Conditional Logics and rules to the field.

10. Wrapper Attributes: This option is used to add custom styling to the fields and to its wrapper class.

attribute

Tools

Here, the plugin also allows you to save and export the fields and their settings to be used in other ACF plugin enabled websites. You can also import settings and fields too.

tools

Displaying the Field

The rule which you add to the field group will be assigned to all the fields as well. So, the fields will be displayed as per your rules set. One of the example is given below:

We made a field group with multiple Custom Fields to display in only one particular post as per the rules. Hence, the field group will only be available for the user to edit in that particular post and not in others.

edit

custom

Get the Plugin Now
Price: Free

Similar Plugins like ACF

Indeed ACF is a great plugin providing you tons of options for custom fields, which are easy to use. But there are also some other amazing plugins that offer the same features as ACF. Let’s take a look from other option which are worth noting:

Custom Post Types and Custom Fields creator – WCK

Advanced Custom Fields plugin

WCK stands for WordPress Creation Kit which is the combination of three phenomenal tools that help you create, manage and maintain custom post types and fields. Namely, these three tools are, WCK Custom Fields Creator, WCF Custom Post Type Creator and WCK Taxonomy creator.

Get the Plugin

Meta Box – WordPress Custom Fields Framework

Advanced Custom Fields plugin

Meta Box is another great and popular plugin for creating custom post types and fields. The plugin has over 500,000+ active installations. Moreover, the plugin offers you 40+ custom field types with powerful options. It is a lightweight and well-coded and designed plugin, it is  also well documented so anyone would easily start using the plugin.

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Carbon Fields

Advanced Custom Fields plugin

Carbon Fields is a Free plugin specifically designed for coders and with custom fields toolkit. Furthermore, it is an open source plugin so you would also get a chance to use it for commercial purposes. The plugin offers you to add unlimited repeated fields and nested repeated fields levels into a field group. It is also feature rich and Gutenberg Block compatible.

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Pods – Custom Content Types and Fields

Advanced Custom Fields plugin

Pods Framework plugin is another addition in the list to add, create, manage and display custom fields and field types. With Pods, you can easily create, extend and customize content types, create custom settings pages, show your custom fields anywhere using shortcodes and widget. You can also create connections and relationships between your content and fields for better organisation.

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CMB2

CMB2

CMB2 is another developer friendly toolkit used for creating metaboxes, custom fields and forms. The most exciting part of the plugin is that anyone can contribute to it through their GitHub repository. The plugin allows you to create repeatable custom fields and field groups. It has a flexible API and several field types included.

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Conclusion

Advanced Custom Fields plugin is one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress. It has over 1+ million active installations. Maybe because of its simplicity and customization options.

Also, there are also some great competitors too not left far behind. One should definitely consider some options before choosing one. So, you can also pick any one of the great plugins from the list too. Thanks for Reading!

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