Getting Started with ACF Custom Fields & Field Groups

Documentation Videos Getting Started with ACF Custom Fields & Field Groups

Overview

ACF gives you the power to add structured data to WordPress, creating custom fields and field groups to store and display data on your site. In this video, we take a closer look at how to get started with ACF custom fields and field groups, and explore the basics of creating and rendering custom fields on your WordPress site.

What are Field Groups?

Field groups are a fundamental concept in ACF, organizing the custom fields used to store and display data on your WordPress sites. You can think of a field group as a container that holds one or more fields, which can be used to capture specific types of data. For example, you might create a field group called “Additional Post Details” that includes fields for a subtitle, author bio, and featured image.

Creating a Field Group

The process to create a field group is straightforward. Navigate to ACF > Field Groups in your WordPress dashboard and click Add New. From there, you can add as many fields as you wish, with a great degree of control over each field’s validation, presentation, and conditional logic settings. Field groups also include location rules, allowing you to control on which post types, pages, or other locations the field group should appear.

Rendering Custom Fields

Once you’ve created a field group and added fields to it, it’s time to render the fields on the frontend of your WordPress site. The video above shows how to use ACF’s developer-friendly functions to retrieve and display the values of your custom fields in your theme templates.

Next Steps

Custom fields are the secret to adding and managing extra content data in WordPress, empowering you to build detailed, feature-rich sites tailored to your needs. ACF both simplifies and improves custom field creation and management, providing your WordPress site with structured data, an intuitive way to edit it, and a smoother development process.

Take a deeper dive into ACF in our getting started guide, watch a complete walkthrough of how to build a used car site with ACF, or explore the capabilities of ACF Blocks in Create Your First Block.