ACF PRO 5.7.0 – New Architecture for New Features

It’s time for something big, something that hasn’t been seen before – a new level of interaction between custom fields. Get ready for an exciting new version that hopes to set a new standard in interactive content editing! 😮🤯

Advanced Custom Fields version 5.7 features a brand new, shiny, and powerful JavaScript library. This isn’t just a “refactor”, it is a “re think” of the entire architecture with plans to support new exciting features over the forthcoming years.

The first exciting feature is a major upgrade to Conditional Logic. This is something that helps create intuitive content editing, but also something that has not evolved since being introduced many years ago.

Logically Conditioned

With the aim to create an infinitely extendable conditional logic ecosystem (say that 3 times quickly 😉), we began designing, and It didn’t take long until we saw the need for a modular JS library that would facilitate inheritance, instances and relationships – Something the current design does not allow.

The current state of ACF is dominated by jQuery event listeners which work well for user interactions but not for ‘field to field’ interactions. To solve this issue, we designed a lightweight JS library inspired by Backbone.js where each field is given an instance (which can talk to any other instance) and is easily controlled via condition modifiers!

After an intense 3 months of development, we are pleased to announce our new architecture is complete and we are able to make some really difficult things look effortless!

Smarter Settings

This new architecture brings with it some updates to the conditional logic field settings. Previously, this setting was restricted to only a handful of fields with basic rules. Now, you can expect to see almost every field available – each with their own rules!

We have already added in the basics such as “value is equal to”, “value contains” and “value is greater than” and have plans to add in many more condition types over the next few ACF 5.7.0-beta releases! We would love to hear your thoughts too, so please download, install and give us your feedback!

Help Test

We have just released ACF PRO 5.7.0-beta1 and would love your help in testing. If you are interested, please login to your store account and click the See all versions link alongside your license. Download, extract and replace ‘advanced-custom-fields-pro’ plugin folder contents.

There are 2 main goals in testing:

1. Test drive the new conditional logic functionality and provide feedback & bug reports.
2. Ensure existing functionality has not been broken.

Think you’ve found a bug? Please post in detail a new support ticket.

Looking to the Future

This update is as much about conditional logic as it is about the future of WordPress. There is no doubt we are moving towards a JS dominant future, with the likes of Gutenberg making large strides in this direction. Wherever WordPress takes us, ACF will follow, and provide the best tools to edit content!