ACF Chat Fridays: WordPress 6.5 and ACF

ACF Chat Fridays offer an incredible opportunity to meet with other users and the ACF development team. Each session answers your questions about the best way to build WordPress sites with ACF, and provides insight into new features coming to the plugin.

The March 15th session of ACF Chat Fridays focused on new enhancements and features coming in WordPress 6.5, and their potential for use with ACF.

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

Sign up for the next session →

Session Recording

Check out the session summary for highlights, or watch the entire session in the player below.

Session Summary

Iain Poulson kicked off the session with a note that registrations are still open for DE{CODE} 2024, WP Engine’s free, 100% virtual event for WordPress developers. The full agenda is packed with sessions on the business of WordPress, the future of AI, and much more.

Of particular interest to ACF users, Liam Gladdy will team up with Rob Stinson for a presentation on fine-tuning WordPress sites with ACF Blocks. During the session, Liam and Rob will walk through the creation of four ACF Blocks, including two blocks that don’t use ACF fields.

“I think most people probably don’t realize you can do that,” said Liam. “You can use ACF Blocks to kind of give you a PHP template into the React world.” You can register for DE{CODE} 2024 here.

Iain also noted that ACF has made it into the next round of Torque’s Plugin Madness, despite stiff competition. Only 16 plugins remain out of the original field of 64, with voting continuing until April 14, 2024. ACF can always use your votes, and remember you can vote twice per week!

Most of the session focused on a discussion of WordPress 6.5. The Q&A below contains selected portions of the conversation on Block Bindings and the Interactivity API. Check out the session replay for the discussion around other changes coming in WordPress 6.5, including plugin dependencies, new REST API filter hooks, and more.

Q&A

We typically include selected questions from the live sessions of ACF Chat Fridays. Minor edits have been made for clarity and style.

Q: Is the Interactivity API something we can use with ACF Blocks?

A: It would be cool to support it, but how we give you that support is key. Judging by the demos we’ve seen so far, the Interactivity API is for live updating of fields, for example, a “+1” button that shows the count going up in real time. Basically this is registering a piece of data, with the server handling keeping it updated. Arguably, we could do that for ACF fields, but the idea of the Interactivity API is that it’s real time. Opening up something that’s writing data to your ACF fields has potential to seriously impact performance. Imagine a thousand people on your site, all clicking the same thing at the same time, and every time it’s writing to or querying the database.

In addition, this would be something on the front end of the site, so you’d have to write React to get it to work. ACF could likely take greater advantage of the Interactivity API once there’s a back end implementation of it.

Q: Will ACF support the use of the Block Bindings API?

A: WordPress 6.5 will introduce the Block Bindings API, which allows you to bind core blocks to read from different sources, such as custom field data, without the need for custom block boilerplate. ACF will support the use of the Block Bindings API in time for WordPress 6.5, scheduled for release on March 26th.

Resources & Links

We share relevant resources during the call. We’ll sum them up here and try to provide a bit of context:

• Register for DE{CODE} 2024
• Fine-Tuning Your Site: Custom Blocks With ACF
• Vote for ACF in Plugin Madness 2024
• WordPress 6.5 Field Guide
• Interactivity API in WordPress 6.5
• The Block Bindings API
• ACF Emails and News
• Sign up for ACF Beta News
• ACF’s Feedback Page

Coming Up on ACF Chat Fridays

Register today for the next session of ACF Chat Fridays, taking place March 15th, 2024 at 3pm UTC. Questions and suggestions for the development team are always welcome.

What do you think we should cover as we move further into 2024? Let us know on Twitter.

Register for the next session of ACF Chat Fridays here:

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

The list of upcoming sessions is below.

• April 12, 2024
• April 26, 2024
• May 10, 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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