ACF Chat Fridays brings the development team and users together every two weeks for a no-holds barred discussion of everything related to ACF. Keep an eye out for special themed sessions coming soon. In the meantime, keep reading for a recap of the latest session.
The April 28th forum looked at the upcoming first annual ACF User Survey, using ACF with page builders like Bricks, and whether it’s better to use the REST API or WPGraphQL when building headless WordPress sites with ACF.
Co-hosted by Iain Poulson, Liam Gladdy and Damon Cook.
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Video Catch Up
Did you miss us? Hey, it happens. To show there are no hard feelings, you can catch the whole session here, or skip to the session summary for the highlights.
Session Summary
Iain Poulson kicked off the April 28th session with the announcement of ACF’s first-ever survey, dedicated to discovering how you use ACF, how you’re building WordPress sites, and what needs to be improved or added to make ACF even better.
To participate in the survey, make sure to sign up for ACF’s newsletter and emails. We’ll also make the announcement on Twitter, but signing up for emails ensures you’ll get a link to participate in this year’s survey and help guide the development of ACF.
This was followed by some discussion with participants regarding the ability to add custom post types and taxonomies directly in ACF, a feature added in 6.1. None of the call’s participants reported any issues with the feature.
Every ACF Chat Friday gives you the opportunity to ask the ACF team questions about technical challenges and the best way to achieve a specific objective. We’ve included just a few of the questions and answers below. Minor edits have been made for clarity and style.
Q: Other than checking the screen ID directly, is there an action that would make it easier to determine if an Options page is being saved to do something? Basically, when saving the Options page, I’m flicking the toggle on or off. When it’s on, I’m dynamically generating a page in WordPress and copying a template to the theme. When it’s off, I’m deleting the page and removing the template from the theme. Right now, I’m checking the screen position of the screen ID to see if it equals “ACF Options.” It works, but it’s slow and it feels like a hack.
A: There is currently no action to do this in ACF. This is because when you get to the point in the stack where it’s being saved, it’s treated just like any other Options page. We can certainly look into adding something like this in the future.
You could do something like this with the update_option hook, which is WordPress core. It fires every time an option is updated or saved. That would let you manipulate the data based on the fact that this option is being saved, and that the only place that option is likely to be saved is through our Options page.
Q: Are we going to see more integration with page builders like Bricks?
A: Figuring out more about how you’re using ACF is a central part of the survey. Hearing from people who use page builders will certainly help us a lot. Aside from opt-in systems within the plugin, we don’t have a good way to directly measure the scale at which any page builder is being used. The survey will help us patch some of the holes in our knowledge and allow us to make more targeted development decisions.
Q: Looking at headless WordPress, I’m wondering about the differences between the REST API and WPGraphQL. I’ve used REST before and I would lean towards using it again, but it seems like everyone is using GraphQL. Is there a reason for that?
A: We strongly suggest attending one of Jason Bahl’s talks on the subject, either in person or online. He’s a great speaker, and as WPGraphQL’s creator, he can go in-depth on exactly why so many people prefer WPGraphQL when it comes to headless WordPress.
With that said, one of the most striking differences is that, unlike REST, WPGraphQL can merge requests so you get more than a single object with each request. This tends to make it much more performant for headless WordPress.
Atlas, the WP Engine headless solution, is very tightly coupled with WPGraphQL. ACF is now integrating tightly into that workflow as well.
Jason is currently working on the next version of WPGraphQL for ACF, which will take into account custom post types and taxonomies created with ACF.
The next session of ACF Chat Fridays is scheduled for May 2, 2023, at 2pm GMT.
Resources & Links
We share relevant resources during the call. We’ll sum them up here and try to provide a bit of context:
- Don’t Miss the Survey! Sign Up for ACF Emails and News Here
- WPGraphQL
- WPGraphQL – Interacting With WordPress Data in a New Way
- WPGraphQL for Advanced Custom Fields
- Headless WordPress Discord
- Atlas, WP Engine’s Complete Headless Platform
- Crash Course: Build a Headless WordPress App with Faust.js, WPGraphQL & Advanced Custom Fields
Coming Up on ACF Chat Fridays
Join us on May 12th for the next session of ACF Chat Fridays. This session will take place at 2pm GMT.
What do you think we should cover in upcoming sessions? Let us know what you’d like to see on Twitter.
Sign up for the next session of ACF Chat Fridays here:
https://wpeng.in/acf-chat-fridays/
The list of upcoming sessions is below.
- May 12, 2023
- May 26, 2023
- June 23, 2023
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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About the Author
Mike is the Senior Editor of Delicious Brains. Based in Hamilton, Ontario, he has an extensive background in business-to-business communications and marketing. His hobbies include reading, writing, and wrangling his four children.
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