21 Sep 22

ACF 6.0 Release – A Fresh New UI, Block Improvements, Repeater Pagination and More

By Iain Poulson

Advanced Custom Fields version 6.0 is now available! 🚀🎉

This release includes a new plugin UI refresh for both ACF 6.0 and ACF PRO 6.0, pagination for repeater fields with large amounts of data, and new generation of ACF Blocks.

This has been a big effort from all involved. Thanks to all those that tested out the beta and RC releases we’ve put out over the last few months.

ACF PRO 6.0 is available to all lifetime license holders and active subscription customers.

👨‍💻 Please find the release notes below. For the latest ACF news, follow us on Twitter @wp_acf.

Let’s get into it.

A Fresh New UI

It’s been some time since the ACF UI has had a lick of paint, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s worked so well since it was introduced and has always felt native to WordPress’ own UI. However, never changing something or improving on it isn’t a path we want to take. We’ve been planning a refresh of the UI for sometime, to try and keep the plugin inline with other Delicious Brains plugins that had been refreshed recently, such as WP Migrate.

It’s something that has been on the minds of ACF users as well. When we acquired the plugin in 2021, we reached out to users to ask for the top 3 things they would like to see. UI improvement requests were a common theme:

“Improve the UI so that users without any expert programming knowledge can create and use the product.”

We didn’t want this to be a huge change that would disrupt a user’s workflow, but instead a light reskin that focuses on bringing user experience improvements to the Field Group editor.

The team have done a great job with the new design, improving all the ACF plugin admin screens from the Field Group editor to the Tools page.

This new design has only been applied to the admin area of the plugin, it has not been applied to the edit screens where content editors use the custom fields, or frontend forms.

The "Field Groups" page in ACF 6.


The "Tools" page in ACF 6.

Let’s take a look at the new UI and walk through the specific user experience improvements.

Reducing the Vertical Height of the Field Settings

Depending on the field type, the field settings screen can take up a lot of vertical space. This leaves little room for the other fields around it and makes it hard to navigate around. Not all these settings are typically used when editing fields.

The field type settings in ACF 5.

In ACF 6.0 we’ve reorganized the field settings into tabs that logically group the settings and reduces the height a single field takes up on the screen.

The field type settings in ACF 6

Adding New Fields

When you’ve got a Field Group with a large number of fields, it can become difficult to navigate and even harder to scroll to the bottom just to add a new field.

A large number of fields in ACF 5.

In the 6.0 UI refresh we’ve improved the header bar so that it scrolls down the page and has a button to add a new field:

A large number of fields in ACF 6, with a new sticky header bar.

Improved Save

That new header bar also contains a “Save Changes” button that’s always visible. This allows you to save your changes without scrolling up to the top of the page to access the Publish metabox in the sidebar.

We’re removed that metabox and moved the button to delete the Field Group, status toggle, and published date to the “Group Settings” tab of the “Settings” box below the fields:

The field group settings in ACF 6.

Removing the sidebar allows us to give the “Fields” box more width. This helps with field types that have nested subfield interfaces that can get pretty cramped. We’ve tried to improve the nested subfield UI even further to make this much easier to edit:

Editing a repeater field in ACF 6.

Reordering and Collapsing Fields

It’s never been particularly clear that once a field is open revealing its settings, that you can close it again by clicking the field label or the “Edit” link again. I’ve spent more time that I’d like to admit scrolling down to the bottom of the field settings to find the “Close Field” button, which as I’ve already mentioned, could be quite far down!

We’ve improved the opening and closing of a field by being able to click anywhere in the field header bar to toggle it open or closed. We’ve also added a chevron arrow to indicate when a field is open or closed.

Reordering has been improved with the addition of an icon on hover that indicates the field can be dragged around to be reordered.

GIF of opening, closing, and reordering ACF fields

Accessibility

The free version of ACF is installed on over 2 million websites. Along with the ACF PRO plugin users, this is a large number of users who have different accessibility needs. Just like in our other plugins, we are committed to improving accessibility in ACF and that work has started in ACF 6.0.

Keyboard Navigation for Fields

One of the biggest accessibility issues when editing a Field Group is accessing the fields and their settings with only the keyboard. Before 6.0, there was no way to edit fields without the mouse. I’m pleased to say that along with the new UI for the Field Group editor, we have made editing fields with the keyboard possible:

Keyboard navigation of ACF fields

Better Focus States

When using only the keyboard to navigate a UI, it is essential to be able to see where you currently are using focus states for elements.

We’ve improved the focus styling across the Field Group editor, as well as adding much needed focus states to toggle switches, radio buttons, and checkbox groups.

Repeater Pagination

Over the years we have had many support requests from users who have been storing a large amount of data in Repeater fields. This can result in performance issues for the users filling out the data.

Currently, when a user loads the edit page in the WordPress dashboard, ACF loads all the rows of data with all the subfields for each row. Depending on the number of rows and subfields, this can take some time, increasing the overall admin page load time and blocking the user from performing actions like saving the post.

When the post is saved, ACF will send all the subfields for every row back to the server to be updated, even if the data hasn’t changed. This can lead to memory issues, running into the PHP max_input_vars setting, and the data not being saved correctly.

With the 6.0 release we have introduced a new setting for the Repeater, which enables pagination of the records when editing the data.

Please note, the pagination setting is opt-in. It is not enabled by default and will not be turned on for existing repeaters.

Enabling Pagination

You can enable pagination by editing a repeater field and turning on the “Pagination” setting. Once enabled, a new “Rows Per Page” setting will be displayed as well:

The new repeater pagination settings

Things to Note

There are some user experience changes unique to paginated repeaters, which should be a consideration before using the setting.

With standard repeaters, you could reorder rows via a drag-and-drop interface. This doesn’t work with paginated repeaters, as you may need to move an existing row to a different page. Instead, we’ve added the ability to reorder rows by clicking the row number. This will reveal a number input which can be used to designate where the row should be moved to:

A screenshot showing how a row can be reordered.

Once you designate a new row number and update the page, the row will be moved to the new location.

Rows that have been inserted in between existing rows and duplicated rows cannot be reordered until the page has been updated. As such, there is currently no row number displayed next to these rows. We’re looking into adding a useful placeholder here to better illustrate that these new rows have been added, but cannot be reordered.

Also, repeater pagination will not work for fields used inside an ACF Block, as there would be no performance benefit given the repeater data is already stored in the DOM.

Currently pagination isn’t available in repeaters inside other repeaters, or in flexible content field layouts.

A New Generation of ACF Blocks

In the last few releases of WordPress, Gutenberg has made significant changes to all aspects of the block editor and block registration, and this has impacted ACF Blocks. We’ve not been able to move as fast as we would have liked on implementing changes to support these new features for back compatibility reasons, so are excited to announce that ACF 6.0 contains a new block versioning system, allowing you to opt in to new versions which will change things like the markup and structure of ACF Blocks in both the backend and frontend, and may require updates to your theme to support.

ACF 6.0 includes ACF Blocks Version 2. This next generation of ACF Blocks brings us much closer to the native block experience, while still giving you the PHP based templating language you know as a WordPress developer.

Many of our fixes will also apply to existing ACF Blocks. These will remain supported for as long as WordPress supports the previous methods of block registration.

Learn more about all the changes to ACF Blocks in ACF 6.0 here.

Backwards Compatibility

ACF 6.0 is designed to be fully compatible with ACF 5.x and the vast majority of users will be able to upgrade without changing any code.

There are a couple of areas of backwards compatibility that may need some extra work:

More Goodness

Translators

ACF 6.0 introduces a new way of collecting translations from our wonderful contributors, better leveraging the WordPress translation system for the free plugin.

This means ACF 6.0 introduces 10 new languages (or language variants) and updates almost all of the existing ones.

Learn how to help translate ACF and ACF PRO.

These are just the highlights of all the features, improvements, and bug fixes bundled in this release. To see a full list of all the updates, take a look at the changelog.

What’s Next

We’ve got lots of good stuff planned for the near future, including the ability to register custom post types and taxonomies in the UI, as well as improvements to how field types are selected.

Thanks to everyone in the ACF community who helped make this release possible. 🙌

Are you excited about the new UI and other new features and improvements in ACF 6.0? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter.

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About the Author

Iain is the Product Manager for Advanced Custom Fields. He has a long history of building and growing WordPress plugins. Moonlights as a PhpStorm evangelist.

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  • Andrew Fair says:
    September 21, 2022 at 11:42 am

    When I go to update it says "download not found"!

    Excited to see it in action though!

  • justinkruitnl says:
    September 21, 2022 at 12:00 pm

    Please make one change to the new style. When editing a group on a normal 1920×1080 screen, it feels way too cluttered. "Reducing the Vertical Height" has the opposite effect like this, as often it won’t even fit on my screen. Please consider making the .acf-headerbar and .acf-admin-toolbar not sticky to give way more space. At least the .acf-admin-toolbar isn’t necessary, only removing the sticky from that would create more space.

  • Joseph McLean says:
    September 21, 2022 at 12:12 pm

    Love the UI improvements! Been needed for a while!

  • rob152 says:
    September 21, 2022 at 12:17 pm

    This new block implementation is everything that was needed to make sure that ACF continues to be a valuable addition to WordPress block themes. Especially for all of us that have worked with php for many years. Hats off! Well done!

  • Dan Shields says:
    September 21, 2022 at 1:09 pm

    When adding new field groups, the new interface feels considerably slower. I think the tabbed interface looks nice, but it makes it such that you can’t use a keyboard to tab through the options when setting up a field quickly. For editing a field group, I don’t have an issue with the interface. An example of this is the ability to change a field type to "WYSIWYG" and change the display options to an alternate display to "Full". It takes more time and clicks to accomplish this now. Also, the "Or" condition for the entire field group seems to be broken at the moment. Clicking "Add Rule Group" throws an error: Uncaught SyntaxError: "undefined" is not valid JSON

    • Iain says:
      October 12, 2022 at 8:00 am

      Hey Dan, we are looking to improve the speed at which you can navigate around the settings with the tab key. Thanks for the other feedback, we will take it under consideration.

      For the invalid JSON, are you still getting this? Are you using any third-party ACF plugins?

    • Culture Inspired says:
      November 9, 2022 at 4:15 pm

      Exactly, 5 minutes into building out fields for a new site and I downgraded to v5.

      Can’t believe they made this mistake mandatory, moving so much onto different tabs is way slower and time is money.

      Also, when adding a new field the label field isn’t even selected by default, so I can’t just click add and then type the name, so many extra clicks across the board.

  • ginsterbusch says:
    September 21, 2022 at 3:12 pm

    I will test its compatiblity with ClassicPress 1.4.x and report back ASAP. cu, w0lf.

  • Tom says:
    September 21, 2022 at 4:12 pm

    Great updates, look forward to trying it out. Future plans for CPT and Tax creation sound useful too.

  • Glenton Samuels says:
    September 21, 2022 at 5:19 pm

    I like the updates. Does the new UI also apply to ACF Options page feature? Would be nice to be able to craft nicer looking Option pages for plugins and themes.

  • Brad Needham says:
    September 21, 2022 at 6:43 pm

    While this is great to for us developers. We were really hoping to see ui updates to acf in the front-end (editor screens & forms). This is where clients/customers see and interact with acf… and honestly, they need a ui update more then us developers. Developers are used to to working with outdated ui’s, or no ui’s at all. Great update ACF. This aside, it’s definitely a step in the right direction. Hopefully more ui updates really soon!!

  • Brad Needham says:
    September 21, 2022 at 7:00 pm

    Excellent! Now how bout that front-end (editor screen and form) ui update?

  • John 🏄 says:
    September 21, 2022 at 11:20 pm

    First improvement ‘Reducing the Vertical Height of the Field Settings’ which you immediately invalidate by taking up 1/5 of the screen with with the sticky toolbar and headerbar. Seriously thought you would have sort this out before official 6.0 release.

  • Kreatívne služby says:
    September 22, 2022 at 5:48 am

    It looks like someone bought ACF and "improved" it. Like in most cases of quality plugins that were changed to worse after changing owner, this new "improved" interface looks terrible and is completely unusable. Congrats! You ruined one of the best WordPress plugins for developers!

  • Matt says:
    September 22, 2022 at 10:13 am

    I have to agree with Justin. Can you please remove (or at least condense) the sticky elements in the UI redesign? They aren’t useful enough to have visible on the screen at all times. Also, another small UX issue: when you hover over a field or field group row the quick actions bar ("Hide | Duplicate | Move | Delete") appear but also move the title UP, out of its original position. This makes it very easy to miss-click one of the actions when you are just trying to click the title quickly.

  • Levi 👨🏼‍💻 says:
    September 22, 2022 at 10:35 am

    What was wrong with the old UI?! There is no improvement or gain from the new interface, if anything it’s making things harder. Comparing the same field settings on V5 and V6 I’ve found that the vertical height has actually increased (at least for the flexible content field)! You also mentioned improved accessibility, however, I’d argue the color palette used doesn’t have enough contrast to be fully accessible. There’s so much more wrong but I feel WP Engine just don’t care.

    • Iain says:
      October 12, 2022 at 8:04 am

      Hey Levi, it’s the existing Delicious Brains team working on the plugin in WP Engine with more team members and resources, and we care very much. We’re trying to improve ACF for all types of users, but certainly don’t want to make things harder for some people. We are listening to feedback and responding where needed, as you can see from the 6.0.1 and 6.0.2 releases.

  • Indrek says:
    September 22, 2022 at 11:09 am

    "Please stop, it’s already dead!!!" comes to mind. Why, oh why…

  • Дмитрий Середа says:
    September 22, 2022 at 11:25 am

    Hi! i want disable new fresh ui, how should I do it?

  • Adrian Toll says:
    September 22, 2022 at 12:30 pm

    While I imagine quite a bit of hard work has gone into these changes, I’m afraid I have to agree with a lot of the comments here, most of which feels like it’s to do with this plugin not being a solely consumer-facing plugin. In general, making things "simple" in fact makes the job of a users familiar with web interfaces – which I would imagine is a majority of the audience for this plugin – harder rather than easier. For example, increased white space reduces information density, and information density (up to a point) is a good thing for someone who knows what they’re doing. Some specific points:

    The fact that the title of the field moves on mouseover to make room for the Edit / Duplicate / Move / Delete is, with respect, terrible UX. The first time I played around with this (thankfully on a local copy of one of our sites) I managed to deactivate a field without intending to. While hiding the Edit / Duplicate / Move / Delete links until you hover makes sense, making the title jump is really distracting, and it happens each for each field every time you move your mouse down a list of fields.

    The new tabbed interface significantly increases the number of clicks needed to define fields. While I get the idea of trying to make a distinction between General / Validation / Presentation / Conditional Logic, this could be done vertically while still keeping the field header in view by making it sticky as you’ve done with the "Edit Field Group" header. As someone else has pointed out, this also makes keyboard navigation more complicated.

    A balance needs to be struck to get a useful level of information density. When you’re working with this kind of information it’s actually helpful to have as much information on the screen as possible without cluttering it up. In my view the white space has been taken far too far with the new UI and I think the previous version actually had that balance pretty much right. I think ACF users are going to be more comfortable and more productive with more information density than this.

    The colour contrast isn’t nearly enough. All these light greys make it harder to see at a glance where the fields are, where the dividers are and so on. For example, there’s a keyline underneath the Field Type box and it’s so light as to be pretty much invisible. The borders around text inputs, selects and so on are also too recessive in my opinion – they just start blending into the background.

    I’m not one of those people who instinctively hates change. There were a few things that I really disliked abot the old interface that are much better on the new one – like the click-to-drag set of dots that replace the hidden UX in the old version where you had to drag the field number for some reason, and the explicit chevron to expand and contract the field details rather than having to guess you could click "Edit" to contract – but in general I really think this is a step back. I’d started moving from defining fields in PHP to using the UI because it’s more intuitive, but if the UX stays this way then I’m probably going to go back to PHP.

    • Iain says:
      October 12, 2022 at 8:07 am

      Hey Adrian, appreciate this feedback. We’ve fixed the hover issue in 6.0.2. For the tabs, we’re trying to improve ACF for all types of users, but certainly don’t want to make things harder for some people and will take this under consideration, especially around keyboard navigation. We are also working on improving the color contrast.

  • Michael says:
    September 23, 2022 at 1:32 am

    The UI update is feeling clunky. As mentioned by others the jumpy field group names on hover is terrible. Having field options spread across tabs slows down field configuration. Also a bug; when changing field type the WordPress loading gif appears and doesn’t go away, every change shows another loader. Generally agree with most of the other issues people have having. Have to wonder if this change was user tested.

  • Joshua Wolfe says:
    September 23, 2022 at 5:51 am

    The new "UI" is terrible. Allow an option to rollback to the old interface. It feels incomplete and harder to navigate on what should be an easy to use plugin. What’s next unsolicited ads for the PRO versions?

  • TwistedAndy says:
    September 23, 2022 at 11:01 am

    The new UI is significantly worse than the previous one. I can understand your intent to make fields smaller, but the end result is bad and not actually smaller. There’s no big improvements in vertical space, but now most of settings are hidden under tabs. Developers need to do additional clicks to reach some settings. That’s definitely not good. Have you considered making it smaller, put labels aside, put more than one field in a row? Do we have a better design solution for the Close Field button?

  • Mateus says:
    September 25, 2022 at 5:39 pm

    I loved the new UI 👏🏻🚀🚀🚀😍 Congrats and Thanks!

  • Martin Snajdr says:
    September 26, 2022 at 8:32 am

    Are you serious about the new UI? Now it looks like those 3rd party ugly plugins. It used to be perfect, ACF looked like a native WP functionality, because it was built on the native UI. I don’t mind some minor extensions to the native UI, but this such a bad "improvement" that we won’t be updating to 6.0 anytime soon. Hope we will get an option to switch to old UI or somebody will release a plugin to bring back the old UI.

  • Chris says:
    September 26, 2022 at 1:51 pm

    There are some good ideas here, but there’s also so much that’s wrong.

    Everything takes more clicks. This is enormously frustrating and makes ACF much harder to use for developers. Who does this help? The blog post’s quote says it’s for "users without any expert programming knowledge" — what non-devs are using ACF, it doesn’t do anything unless you know how to do template development? If these changes are just to help non-technical people, why punish developers (ie. the main userbase) to do it? And how does obscuring features help a person learn what ACF can do? More visual density = more complexity, higher cognitive load, and faster mental exhaustion. You’ve made a simple GUI into something that’s needlessly complex. Tabbing between fields no longer works well, you have to shift+tab to go back through your fields just to change the currently selected tab. Before, you could just press tab once, and be editing the next field. Just tabbing between two fields now takes longer too, as the tooltip is including in the tab group (and how does hiding that information help anyone?) Loads of important info is buried in tabs, so you can’t just open a field to see all of its data (instructions, conditionals, validation). No more highly visible overviews, it’s much easier to hide mistakes now and takes way longer to find and fix them. The sticky headers take up a huge amount of screen space, negating the point of reducing the overall height. Who’s getting part-way through editing a field group and deciding to abandon them and view ACF’s settings instead? You don’t need a sticky ACF nav, that’s what the sidebar menu is for (which is already sticky). And you don’t need to always see the name of the field group, as you only need to set it once. But if you really have to have a sticky nav, why not have the "Add field" and "Save Changes" buttons in the one single sticky header? You’ve removed the sidebar to make space for… what? Even in the blog post’s screenshots, which aim to show how much more you can do with the new amount of space, there’s a huge amount of empty space on the right. The sidebar was useful, especially for extensions (like ACFE), whose metaboxes are now stuck at the top of the page, which actually takes up more space. Double-clicking field names to copy and paste them now opens then closes the field. It’s not a breaking issue but is visually frustrating. Using your own GUI design instead of WP’s native GUI doesn’t make it easier to use, it makes it harder; every plugin with its own GUI means learning something new each time. If you want to improve things, push visual improvements upstream to core instead (or not, when people tell you they’re a bad idea: Inconsistent, breaks existing visual mod plugins, etc). The Settings metabox at the bottom takes 3 tabs to show what used to be visible in the same amount of space as the new Presentation tab, and again, hiding the "Hide on screen" section in another tab just makes it harder for developers to get an overview of what the field group is doing, making it harder to identify issues at a glance. Having the title of a field move when you hover over it is just awful UX, it makes it much easier to make a mistake and click the wrong button, I’ve unintentionally duplicated fields too many times already — "hover and click" is now "hover, wait for things to change, re-align your move, then finally click". I’ve seen this before in video games that troll the player by moving things when you try to click on them, but never in a paid product like this.

    There are plenty of elegant solutions to the problems you’ve raised, but this approach is far from that. In trying to solve a handful of problems for a select few, you’ve created dozens of problems for a much larger number of people. ACF, one of the best plugins for WP, is now much less usable, considerably less user friendly, and way more time consuming.

    • Tom Hole says:
      September 27, 2022 at 8:54 am

      I posted a fairly negative comment right at the start about not needing to break from the WP native UI. However, I figured I would give it all chance. I came back to write some (what I hope is) constructive feedback on what actually impacts my ability to work with ACF. Your comment is bang on what I have in my notes so instead I second all this! The short version is that now actually using 6.0 takes much more time than before because everything is hidden and I am having to click between panels. I have lost the ability to see everything in an information-dense way. A lot of the UX decisions ‘look nice’ but are poor UX practice. Keyboard nav is mostly dead. Really disappointing.

    • bosettiandrea says:
      September 29, 2022 at 4:12 am

      Couldn’t say it better. They should treasure comments like yours and use them to improve the mess they dished us. The ones who came up with the "new and fresh ui" probably have never even worked with this plugin as they for sure don’t know what it means to manage groups with dozens and dozens of fields! So disappointing, yet another plugin ruined by acquisitions.

    • TwistedAndy says:
      October 6, 2022 at 1:27 pm

      I had the same experience. Everything requires more clicks and vertical space. I decided to stay on 5.12.3. Here’s a small snippet to remove the update notification: if (function_exists(‘acf_updates’)) { remove_filter(‘pre_set_site_transient_update_plugins’, [acf_updates(), ‘modify_plugins_transient’], 10, 1); As for ACF subscription users, I don’t see a lot of sense in paying for these "updates".

    • Chad Reitsma says:
      October 6, 2022 at 5:23 pm

      Thank god someone said it.

    • Iain says:
      October 12, 2022 at 8:15 am

      Hey, thanks for taking the time to give us this feedback! We’ve already fixed a number of these issues in 6.0.1 and 6.0.2 (sticky header, hover on field label) and we have a fix coming soon to the field name double-click issue. We are listening to feedback and will take the rest under consideration.

    • Iain says:
      December 13, 2022 at 2:32 pm

      We’ve just shipped ACF 6.0.6 with the ability to disable the tabbed view for field settings. 🙌

  • Jonas Horsner says:
    September 27, 2022 at 12:20 pm

    Why why why! If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! Been using ACF since 2014, and it as been the absolute best plugin ever! And then with the snap of a finger, it’s been ruined.. It is absolute horrible to work with now, so slow! and the "fresh" UI is anything but user-friendly. So sad, so sad!

    • Iain says:
      October 12, 2022 at 8:17 am

      Hey Jonas, sorry to hear this. We love ACF too. We’re trying to improve ACF for all types of users, but certainly don’t want to make things harder for some people and will look to improve the plugin in coming releases.

  • Nico Jantz says:
    September 28, 2022 at 3:11 am

    yes, that redesign was not needed and is horrible in a lot of places. so for now this went into my admin stylesheet: .post-type-acf-field-group #wpcontent { font-family: -apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,"Segoe UI",Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,"Helvetica Neue",sans-serif!important; } @media (min-width: 600px) { .acf-admin-toolbar { display: none; } .acf-headerbar { top: 32px; } }

    • Milan Balbicky says:
      September 28, 2022 at 5:21 am

      Thanks. By me this as well .acf-admin-toolbar-upgrade-btn, #acf-field-group-pro-features { display: none !important; } .post-type-acf-field-group .metabox-holder.columns-1 #acf-field-group-fields, .post-type-acf-field-group .metabox-holder.columns-1 #acf-field-group-options, .post-type-acf-field-group .metabox-holder.columns-1 .meta-box-sortables.ui-sortable, .post-type-acf-field-group .metabox-holder.columns-1 .notice { max-width: 100%; }

  • Milan Balbicky says:
    September 28, 2022 at 5:10 am

    Nice UI change, but not UX. Lot of more unnecessary clicks, especially by tabs 🙁 Rather have longer screen and everything on one page, as click and click and click and click. Very annoying 🙁

  • Dennis Kather says:
    September 28, 2022 at 6:55 am

    I have to go with the more critical feedbacks here in the comments. In my case it is a bit special, cause i do a lot of WordPress admin area modifications by myself. So i did for several ACF CSS too. So i was not surprised to get broken layouts by upgrading to a new ACF version with CSS "improvements". Meanwhile i "fixed" some of the – imho – issues and unnecessary "improvements" and just want to share one of my "optimisations". The options of a field configuration. Maybe it is a little inspiration for you …

    anything at one single view (no tabs) more compact, cause labels are left sided removed some options (Rest-API, delete fieldgroup, the tabs, …) 2-columned "hide on screen" section

    A little screenshot can be watched here.

  • Claudio says:
    September 28, 2022 at 4:19 pm

    I don’t understand all the criticism regarding the UI. It was long overdue and is now more orderly. I’ve been an ACF user since 2015 and can’t find anything negative about it. Maybe it makes sense if we can select the UI, for those who do not want the new one. I am looking forward to the CPT and TAX integration. Thank you!

  • bosettiandrea says:
    September 29, 2022 at 3:59 am

    You probably put a lot of effort and work on this, but you should’ve asked earlier your core users for a feedback to save time and resources. The graphic improvements were absolutely not needed, this feels like another plugin (one for entry level users) and everything is not straightforward anymore. To put it simple: horrible impractical redesign. Please fix it, you have plenty of suggestions here in the comments.

  • Carl says:
    September 29, 2022 at 9:04 am

    The new UI is kinda great but I feel slower creating stuff with it. The things that’s bug me now it’s when we click on any fields, it expands and that’s annoying as hell. Sometimes I just want to change the field order and the field expands completly. Now with 6.0.1, changing fields orders don’t even save. It is possible to go back to 5.6x after installing 6.0.1? Because I don’t think it’s quite ready yet for production.

  • Iain says:
    September 30, 2022 at 7:42 am

    Hey Andrew, I think this coincided with issues we had with the site at the time of release. Let me know if you’re still having problems updating.

  • Christian Pucci says:
    October 1, 2022 at 5:57 pm

    I’m sorry but I don’t find this new UI efficient and well designed. All very slow in terms of performance, from the opening of the individual fields to more. I like TAB navigation to separate things well but I don’t like the rest at all.

  • Chad Reitsma says:
    October 6, 2022 at 5:21 pm

    Not a fan of the new UI. Any option to use the old one?

  • Fossil says:
    October 11, 2022 at 10:37 pm

    Just used the new admin UI for the first time, and it’s awful, a huge step backwards.

    Sometimes new fields within Flexible Content fields are not saved All the General/Presentation/etc tab panels break up the editing flow and make the whole experience much more mouse intensive In a group field, tab away from the field name box of a subfield and the whole form scrolls horizontally because the tooltip is offscreen Panel borders are very low contrast – harder to see where you are Feels much bigger vertically – I’d hate to edit on a laptop screen

    So I’m now reverting all my sites from 6.0.2 to 5.12.3 and will be looking for an alternative plugin, despite having a lifetime pro license. I would seriously recommend reverting the UI to the 5.x version before you lose more users. I knew WP Engine’s takeover would be disastrous.

    • Iain says:
      October 12, 2022 at 8:26 am

      Hey, a good deal of this work started before the acquisition and all of us now at WP Engine only want the best for ACF so we’re working hard to improve it for all users.

      For the bug you’re seeing – "Sometimes new fields within Flexible Content fields are not saved" can you recreate this or is it random? Please send us some details if you have time to our support team.

      • Fossil says:
        October 13, 2022 at 12:13 am

        It was random. This is what sometimes but not always happened:

        1. Go to field group
        2. Open a flexible content field
        3. In one of the content sections, create a new group field
        4. Field title box doesn’t focus
        5. Field name box doesn’t populate from field title
        6. Enter various details for field
        7. Save
        8. New group field nowhere to be seen

        So because of the missing behaviours which I assume are JS-based, I figure it was probably a JS error.

        (WP 6.0.2, ACF Pro 6.0.2, Disable Gutenberg 2.8, WPML 4.5.11, ACF Multilingual 1.10.4)

        But now I’ve reverted to 5.12.3 so can’t test again. Looking at Carbon Fields for new projects.

      • Chad Reitsma says:
        October 14, 2022 at 1:16 pm

        Can we please just get an option to use the old UI if we want to? This version makes everything harder.

      • Fossil says:
        October 22, 2022 at 10:27 pm

        Just for info, I did reply to this post with error details, but my reply was never approved.

  • Willy Bahuaud says:
    October 17, 2022 at 6:28 am

    Hello,

    Please, is there a filter or something to bring back the old UI?

  • Razvan Frandes says:
    October 24, 2022 at 7:39 am

    Very bad design, to be honest. I don’t have a problem with how it looks, but how it works, is very bad and slow. Please make a option to bring the old design back, my browser breaks when I try to edit a flexible field with 7 components in it. I know it’s a work in progress and it will be good over time, but please make a option to brin the old design back. Thank you!

    • Iain says:
      October 26, 2022 at 6:23 am

      Hey Razvan, I’d like to investigate the slowness for your field group, would you mind sending a message to our support with an export of the field group so we can recreate and test please?

  • Orion Belt says:
    October 25, 2022 at 11:10 am

    why the total UX rework? i get the structure changes. good stuff. but redesigning how the buttons look like? why not use the design that is already there in the wp admin, why make it stick out like a sour thumb? i liked that acf integrated so organically into the wp admin, now it just looks dumb.

    also please don’t remove the acf register block function because not everyone uses static values for the block configs, we actually use functions and classes for a dynamic render template.

  • Marek L says:
    November 1, 2022 at 7:20 pm

    HEY HEY HEY! NOBODY asked for stupid unwanted changes!! it sucks! 9 from 10 people hate redesign, not enough for you to bring it back? what was wrong with old UI? now it looks absolutely terrible like cheap commercial bloated third-party plugin. you ruined good looking and working plugin used by thousand of people worldwide and by years. shame on you. I as buyer now want refund money.

  • Przemek Hernik says:
    November 3, 2022 at 6:06 am

    It looks that Delicious Brains tries to create another shitty plugin like Ninja Forms which intention is to be available for all the users – even without technical knowledge. Unfortunately, that’s great way for loosing the most numerous part of your target group that developers are.

    Is there a chance that you’ll provide security updates and patches to 5.X.X versions? If not – the only way to keep ACF useful is using old version (5.12.3) and disable updates. Or even maybe create another plugin that will be more developer-friendly as the previous versions were.

    I understand that you want to try to be more available, but you can loose a lot of clients because of that 😀

  • Martin Defatte says:
    November 7, 2022 at 3:42 pm

    Wow. The flexible content field takes up SO MUCH VERTICAL SPACE NOW. It’s so hard to look at now. I’m working on an existing site that I built, and I can’t even tell what I’m looking at anymore. The old version, while it had it’s issues was easier to look at. Seriously. Way to ruin a great product. It would be nice if there was a "legacy layout" option so I don’t have to look at the "new and improved" UI.

  • Denis Bogdanov says:
    November 9, 2022 at 4:17 am

    Please give us an option to go back to the old UI. My development time is doubled…

  • Andreas Demetriou says:
    November 16, 2022 at 1:40 pm

    Why is noone mentioning the fact the acf-json folder is not working anymore?? Is there a fix for this?

  • Fabian Wolf says:
    December 7, 2022 at 9:44 am

    Just downgraded to 5.12.4 again. Sorry, but this new fancy GUI is just utter garbage.

    It’s clunky, non-streamlined, bloated, and even worse, ableist (because it decreases accessibility). Color choices are mediocre, at best (and inaccessible at worst).

    Accessibility and Usability should be first and foremost for UI breaking changes, not some alphamale rivalry contest to add their mark somewhere just to be able to say "ooooh, look I did it its mine now!".

    Maybe I just should start backporting stuff from 6? Not that I dont have enough on my plate already, thank you very much (not).

    cu, w0lf.

  • Justin Ewart says:
    December 21, 2022 at 5:29 pm

    I think putting field labels on top instead of on the left adds way too much vertical space, and the sticky header bar is annoying. This is what I put in my admin stylesheet and it feels much better:

    / Tweak ACF 6 UI / .acf-headerbar-field-editor {position: static} .acf-field-settings .acf-field {margin-bottom: 20px} .acf-field-settings .acf-field .acf-label, .acf-field-settings .acf-field .acf-input {display: inline-block} .acf-field-settings .acf-field .acf-label {width: 20%; padding-top: 6px} .acf-field-settings .acf-field .acf-input {width: 76%} .acf-field-settings .acf-field .acf-radio-list, .acf-field-settings .acf-label .description {white-space: nowrap} .acf-field-settings .acf-field-true-false .acf-input {width: auto; white-space: nowrap; padding-top: 10px} .acf-field-settings .acf-field.acf-field-setting-label, .acf-field-settings .acf-field-setting-wrapper {padding-top: 20px}

  • Alexandre Plennevaux says:
    January 10, 2023 at 7:26 am

    I personally find the UI updates very useful, especially the layouts stack in Flexible Content, but many little tweaks are really nice touches. Great job, team!

    Would it be possible to avoid full page refreshes all together when editing custom fields? I find it a tad annoying to have to re-open things where I left them up before the saving occurred (I tend to save a lot, being afraid to lose work). Auto-saving in the background would be nice too!

  • Gareth Mueller says:
    February 7, 2023 at 7:20 am

    I’m sorry, but I really dislike the new changes to the GUI. Why is ACF using its own styles for form elements, instead of the WordPress defaults? Every plugin seems to do this leaving the WordPress admin area looking like a random mish-mash. I don’t know why ACF felt the need to also go down this route.

    The interface was super easy to use previously. Now I really have to look closely to figure out what I’m doing.

    I suppose I can live with the Field Groups area being like this because typically it is only developers who would use this. But I pray they don’t start changing the client facing areas when editing Pages and Posts.

  • chood531 says:
    February 17, 2023 at 5:28 am

    Do you all have any plans to roll back the UI changes? It’s made the plugin a lot less useable in my opinion.

    • chood531 says:
      February 17, 2023 at 5:29 am

      it feels like it was probably designed by a designer that has never spent hours upon hours in the ACF admin screen creating fields. The new design is really quite a bit more difficult to navigate.

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