ACF Chat Fridays serve as a monthly gathering point for the Advanced Custom Fields community, offering an open platform where users, developers, and the ACF team converge to explore the plugin’s ecosystem. These sessions cover a wide range of topics, from upcoming features and recent updates to innovative WordPress development techniques using ACF. Participants have the unique opportunity to engage directly with the development team, seek solutions to their challenges, and contribute to shaping the future direction of ACF.

The February 7, 2025 session of ACF Chat Fridays focused on upcoming features in ACF 6.4, block editor improvements, and custom icon set support.

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

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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 session by highlighting the recent release of ACF 6.3.12, which addressed some critical bugs, particularly around ACF Blocks. He also mentioned the release of the new ebook Getting Started With ACF, which serves as a handy reference guide for newcomers to the plugin.

The team also discussed the upcoming ACF 6.4 release and future releases, which will include:

  • Support for WooCommerce’s High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) system
  • A significant blocks refactor that fixes several bugs
  • Improvements to the block editor user experience
  • New ways to register blocks

While not part of the 6.4 release, the team is working on making ACF fields in the block editor more React-based in the future. They’re also developing inline editing capabilities for Text and Text Area fields within ACF blocks.

Matt Shaw shared information about ongoing work to make the Icon Picker more extensible. In the future, users will be able to use custom icon sets with the icon picker, leveraging the same UI for searching and selecting icons.

The team also discussed potential improvements to block visibility in Full Site Editing (FSE) templates and the various ways to control block behavior using existing WordPress APIs.

Q&A

Q: Are there instructions for creating a custom post type with ACF and making it a plugin?

A: While there isn’t specific documentation for setting it up as a plugin, you can use the ACF tools page to export your field groups as PHP code. This exported code can then be integrated into a standalone plugin file. There’s also a YouTube video tutorial called Building a Reusable Plugin for All Your ACF Projects that covers this topic.

Q: Is it possible to hide blocks from certain templates when using Full Site Editing (FSE) templates?

A: While ACF doesn’t have a built-in feature for this, there are several WordPress core features that might help achieve this:

  1. The block.json file allows you to specify post types where a block can be used.
  2. The Block Locking API provides ways to control where and how blocks can be used.
  3. The allowed_block_types_all filter can be used to control which blocks are available in different contexts.

Resources & Links

Coming Up on ACF Chat Fridays

Register today for the next session of ACF Chat Fridays. Sessions are typically held on the first Friday of every month. 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.

  • March 7, 2025
  • April 4, 2025
  • May 2, 2025
  • June 6, 2025

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.