ACF Chat Fridays: Demoing ACF Forms

ACF Chat Fridays are a biweekly opportunity for WordPress developers and the ACF team to connect, share knowledge, and explore the latest developments. These open office hours provide a platform for users to ask questions, share feedback, and get insights into the future of ACF, while learning from the experts and other members of the community.

The August 2nd session of ACF Chat Fridays included a demo of ACF Forms, a discussion of the currently ongoing ACF annual survey, and highlights from the recent release of ACF 6.3.5.

Co-hosted by Iain Poulson, Matt Shaw, Liam Gladdy, Damon Cook, and Anthony Burchell.

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Session Recording

You can see the entire session in the player below, or catch the highlights in the session summary.

Session Summary

Iain Poulson kicked off the August 2nd session by noting that it would include a demo of ACF forms by Damon Cook of WP Engine’s DevRel team. In addition, Iain also discussed how ACF Chat Fridays going forward will be held every month instead of every other week. The change aims to allow for more planned topics and demos.

In his opening remarks, Iain also mentioned that the ACF annual survey is still open, and encouraged everyone to participate if they haven’t already. You can fill out the ACF survey here.

Finally, Iain highlighted the recent release of ACF 6.3.5 before handing the mic over to Damon for a demo of ACF forms.

Damon’s demo on ACF Forms showed how to create a front end form that allows users to submit new recipes directly from the site’s front end, with fields for name, email, recipe details, ingredients, prep time, cook time, etc. Once submitted, the form triggers an email to the WordPress site admin and saves the recipe as a draft for review. You can skip directly to the demo portion of the session here.

The final codebase from the ACF form demo is available on GitHub, and you can demo the functionality for yourself in the WordPress Sandbox.

Q&A

We’ve included some of the questions and answers from the latest session below. Minor edits have been made for clarity and style.

Q: Do you have to create a post with the content when using ACF Forms?

A: Not necessarily. While ACF Forms assume that you want to store data in a post type by default, you can provide a set of field group IDs instead. This allows for more flexibility in how you handle form submissions, such as sending an email or storing data elsewhere.

Q: How does ACF handle file uploads in front end forms?

A: In front end forms, ACF defaults to basic file uploads because users typically won’t have authentication to access the WordPress media library. However, if users are logged in and have appropriate permissions, it can use the WordPress media library for drag-and-drop functionality.

Q: What strategies do you use for automated testing with ACF blocks? We’re trying to use Playwright to test block settings (change a dropdown, then verify it changed on our front end) and struggling to find and use DOM elements that ACF generates. Any thoughts on introducing data-test on any elements?

A: We’re actually working on this ourselves at the moment! We’re using Playwright and the WordPress Gutenberg helpers to let us do blocks, and we’ve got a layer in the middle to automatically add IDs we can use. Once we’re done, we’ll get the process written up so you can refer to it.

Q: When I create ACF metaboxes on a page that store page meta, WordPress makes additional network requests to post to post.php multiple times to save the meta. It’s very bad for performance and very hacky. From what I’ve read, it seems like WordPress core has no appetite to improve this. Are there any plans to improve how we can create fields and store page meta for ACF that aren’t blocks?

A: Yup! This is part of the future of ACF Blocks we’ve talked about a bit now. We’ll be moving away from the legacy metabox and using the REST API natively. We’re currently figuring out all the things we need to do, and the order we need to do it all, then we can break that up into our next few major releases. Things will start shipping in 6.4 to improve this performance though!

Q: The width of the sidebar is no longer editable in WordPress 6.6, so it crunches ACF fields pretty badly when used in preview mode. Any tips and trips (aside from using edit mode) to help with that sidebar?

A: We’ve been discussing this for a while with the Gutenberg design team, because until recently there wasn’t a pattern or UI element which suited our use case of moving complex fields out of the sidebar. But in WordPress 6.6 they’ve started using modals for things other than page settings, so we know now we won’t be breaking the core pattern by moving field edit forms out to a modal.

Our designer will still want to take a pass at what that looks like, but you can expect us to fix it as part of the “future of ACF Blocks” too. A couple of field types simply aren’t usable in the sidebar at the moment, so we know it’s important!

Q: Will ACF team members be attending WordCamp US this year?

A: Yes, Damon Cook and Anthony Burchell are both planning to attend WordCamp US. In fact, Damon is presenting! Please make sure to drop by the WP Engine booth and say hi!

Coming Up on ACF Chat Fridays

Register today for the next session of ACF Chat Fridays, taking place September 6th, 2024 at 2pm UTC. Questions and suggestions for the development team are always welcome.

Register for the next session of ACF Chat Fridays here:

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

The list of upcoming sessions is below.

• September 6, 2024
• October 4, 2024
• November 1, 2024
• December 6, 2024

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 with #ACFChatFridays on Twitter.

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