ACF Chat Fridays: Annual User Survey, ACF 6.3.4, and WooCommerce HPOS Support

ACF Chat Fridays are the biweekly open forum where the ACF community comes together to discuss all things ACF, including future developments, the latest releases, the best ways to build WordPress sites with ACF, and much more.

The July 19th session of ACF Chat Fridays covered the recent releases of ACF 6.3.4, the annual ACF user survey, and enhancements coming in ACF 6.4.

Co-hosted by Iain Poulson, Matt Shaw, Liam Gladdy, Anthony Burchell, and Phil Johnston.

Sign up for the next session →

Session Summary

Iain Poulson kicked off the session by discussing the ACF annual survey, currently in progress. The survey helps the development team understand how ACF is being used, how its users are building WordPress sites, which features they’d most like to see, and more. These results then help shape ACF’s development roadmap. You can participate in the survey at https://wpeng.in/acf-survey/.

Also under discussion was the recent release of ACF 6.3.4, which includes improvements and refinements to block validation and some changes to the ACF Shortcode. The ACF shortcode has been disabled by default since ACF 6.3 for new installs, but ACF 6.3.4 adds a notice that appears if you attempt to use the shortcode and preview a post when the shortcode is disabled. In addition, ACF 6.3.4 enables by default a filter that prevents the shortcode from accessing fields on a non-public post. Please see the release post for more details.

Iain also noted that the team is working on ACF 6.4, which will introduce a new UI to register ACF Blocks directly within the plugin, similar to the Options Pages UI introduced in ACF 6.2. Among other enhancements expected in ACF 6.4., ACF Blocks using Text and Text Area fields will have an improved editing experience that’s much closer to the native WordPress editing experience, allowing editors to preview and update text directly in the block. The eventual goal is to bring this type of native WordPress editing experience to other custom fields in ACF Blocks as well.

Additionally, ACF 6.4 should include support for WooCommerce’s high-performance order system (HPOS). ACF is frequently used to add custom fields to WooCommerce order screens, but none of those custom fields are accessible if you’ve turned on HPOS or installed a version of WooCommerce that turns it on by default. This is because HPOS stores orders in a custom database table, rather than the native WordPress tables supported by ACF. However, support for using ACF fields with HPOS is coming. Under the hood, the refactoring needed to achieve greatly expands the possibilities for storing ACF field data in the future.

Resources & Links

• ACF 6.3.4 Released
• ACF Annual Survey
• WordCamp Canada Recap
• ACF Emails and News
• Sign up for ACF Beta News
• ACF’s Feedback Page

Coming Up on ACF Chat Fridays

Register today for the next session of ACF Chat Fridays, taking place on August 2nd, 2024, at 2 pm UTC. Questions and suggestions for the development team are always welcome.

Tag or DM us on Twitter to let us know you’ll be there. Suggest new topics, let us know what you’d like to see, and send us feedback on Twitter.

Register for the next session of ACF Chat Fridays here:

https://wpeng.in/acf-chat-fridays/

The list of upcoming sessions is below.

• August 2, 2024
• August 16, 2024
• August 30, 2024
• September 13, 2024

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