Flexible Theme Development with ACF Pro

What kind of WordPress themes is this talk about?

  • Custom designed themes for clients
  • Themes with moderate to extremely complex layouts

Editing experience for clients

Plain editor

Page Builders

Shortcode Bonanza

Gutenberg? 🤔

ACF Pro is a great choice for an editing experience in the middle of this range.

Least flexible

Most flexible

Flexible here means the extent to which the content and appearance of a site can be altered without coding knowledge

Theme goals

ACF Pro helps you build themes that meet these goals:

 

  • Future Proofing
  • Decisions, not Options
  • Protect the Design

Theme goals:

 

Future Proofing

  • Think like your client and anticipate flexibility they may want later
  • Optimize for easy code revisions in the future

Theme goals:

 

Decisions, not Options

  • Don't overwhelm your clients
  • Give them the options that cover common / likely scenarios

* https://wordpress.org/about/philosophy/

Theme goals:

 

Protect the Design

theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

How does ACF Pro help?

  • ACF Pro lets you compose various field groups into a custom editing experience.
     
  • It can be used as a DIY page builder where the theme developer still gets ultimate control over the site.
     
  • It results in an editing experience that feels natural to WordPress and familiar to users.

Field types

Basic

 

  • Text
  • Textarea
  • Radio
  • Checkbox
  • WYSIWYG
  • Etc

Layout

 

  • Tab
  • Repeater
  • Group
  • Clone
  • Flexible Content

Let's look at a test theme

Downsides

  • Theme dependency on ACF Pro

  • Page content is spread across meta fields

Next Steps

  • Explore additional ACF fields

  • Build your own ACF fields

  • Use ACF hooks to get more control over ACF's appearance and functionality

  • Use ACF's 'Local JSON' feature to keep your custom fields in version control

Flexible theme development with ACF Pro

By Daniel Abernathy

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Flexible theme development with ACF Pro

Theme developers are often caught between giving clients too much freedom (page builders) or building rigid themes that don’t adapt to clients’ changing needs. Using ACF Pro, you can have the best of both worlds by creating a flexible editing experience that won’t break your design. We’ll walk through a completed theme built using ACF Pro.

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