21 Mar 24

ACF 6.2.8-RC1

By Iain Poulson

Advanced Custom Fields PRO version 6.2.8-RC1 is now available.

This release contains support for upcoming WordPress 6.5 features, a few bug fixes, and it enables our new behavior requiring an activated license to use PRO features.

This is a PRO only release candidate to allow users to test the new features ahead of 6.2.8’s scheduled release in early April. You can download this release from your account now.

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

WordPress 6.5

WordPress 6.5 brings several new features which you can use with ACF. From Block Bindings to the Interactivity API, WordPress 6.5 brings new opportunities to use ACF data in core WordPress blocks, and new interactivity experiences to ACF Blocks. Some of these changes features require ACF to add compatibility, and this release begins that work.

Block Bindings API

The Block Bindings API allows you to connect ACF data to attributes of WordPress core blocks. Initially, ACF will support using ACF metadata assigned to the current page in the supported blocks and their attributes.

There is currently no WordPress core UI to configure a block binding. Instead it requires manually adding the binding in the code editor inside the block editor.

For example, the following code replaces the value of a Paragraph block with the current value of the ACF field named paragraph:

<!-- wp:paragraph {
    "metadata":{
        "bindings":{
            "content":{
                "source":"acf/field",
                "args":{
                    "key":"paragraph"
                }
            }
        }
    }
} -->
<p>The value of this paragraph comes from a block binding and will be replaced at render.</p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph -->

In WordPress 6.5, the APIs required to show a preview of bound attributes are currently locked to WordPress core, and are unavailable to developers.

This means your bound field values will only be visible on the front-end.

In future releases, we intend to add support for access to fields from other posts or object types such as users, terms and options. For security reasons, access to field values from other locations will require additional code to mark those fields as available to block bindings.

Select2 HTML Escaping

In ACF 6.2.7, we changed how HTML can be rendered in select2 values, matching the default select2 behavior which ensures malicious HTML can not be injected into a select field, preventing potential XSS attacks.

ACF 6.2.8 changes this further, adding a new select2_escape_markup JS filter which can be used to override this behavior should you have any fields which should contain HTML. You can continue to override either the templateSelection or escapeMarkup properties via the existing select2_args JS filter.

You can find more information on how to use this filter in the JS API Documentation

Changelog

  • New – Support for the Block Bindings API in WordPress 6.5 with a new acf/field source
  • New – Support for performance improvements for translations in WordPress 6.5
  • Enhancement – A new JS filter, select2_escape_markup now allows fields to customize select2’s HTML escaping behavior
  • Fix – Options pages can no longer set to have a parent of themselves
  • Fix – ACF PRO license activations on multisite subsite installs will now use the correct site URL
  • Fix – ACF PRO installed as a must-use plugin on multisite installs will no longer try to check for updates resulting in 404 errors
  • Fix – ACF JSON no longer produces warnings on Windows servers when no ACF JSON folder is found
  • Other – ACF PRO now requires a valid license to be activated in order to use PRO features. Learn more
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