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
Theme goals:
Protect the Design
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