Recent events do not impact customers of ACF PRO. All updates of ACF PRO will continue to be served from advancedcustomfields.com and no action is required.
Due to recent events in the WordPress ecosystem, WP Engine employees have been blocked from accessing WordPress.org. This means the ACF team is unable to deploy updates to the free version of ACF hosted on WordPress.org and users running this plugin on their sites were removed from the ability to automatically update to newer versions.
To resolve this, our engineering team at WP Engine has worked hard on an alternative update mechanism for the free version of ACF. While there are no pending security updates for ACF, this alternative update mechanism ensures your sites are ready to receive new features, bug fixes, and security updates going forward.
How to Update ACF
In order to update your site’s version of ACF and receive updates in the future, please follow these steps:
- Download the latest zip of the plugin
- Log in to your site
- Navigate to Plugins > Add new
- Upload the zip file
- Confirm you want to overwrite the existing ACF plugin
- Future updates for the plugin will be available in the WordPress admin as normal
How to Install ACF
Users who are installing ACF for the first time on a site should follow these steps:
- Download the latest zip of the plugin
- Log in to your site
- Navigate to Plugins > Add new
- Upload the zip file
- Click ‘Activate Plugin’,
Other WP Engine Plugins
The block of WordPress.org access has affected all of WP Engine’s free plugins and if you have sites that run multiple WP Engine plugins, future updates have been made easier by our new ‘WP Engine Secure Updater’ plugin. Once installed it will tell each WP Engine plugin to retrieve updates from our update service. To install the plugin, please follow these steps:
- Download the WPE Secure Update plugin zip
- Navigate to Plugins > Add new
- Upload the zip file
- Activate the plugin
- Navigate to Dashboard > Updates
- Select the WP Engine plugins to update
- Click ‘Update Plugins’
ACF PRO
This does not impact customers of ACF PRO. All updates of ACF PRO will continue to be served from advancedcustomfields.com and no action is required.
WP Engine Customers
If you are a WP Engine or Flywheel customer, your sites will receive automatic updates of the free version of ACF, and the other WP Engine plugins, as updates are available. You are not required to manually update to the latest version of ACF to receive future automatic updates.
Spread the Word
We need your help! Reaching the users of over 2 million sites that use the free ACF plugin is going to be hard so we need every amplification possible to help get users updated.
Please share this blog post and this post on X/Twitter.
We have also created a new status page so you can quickly and easily keep track of issues with updates and releases in the future.
From all of the ACF team here at WP Engine, thank you for your continued support.
For questions and help about this release, please contact our support team.
About the Author
Iain is the Product Manager for Advanced Custom Fields. He has a long history of building and growing WordPress plugins. Moonlights as a PhpStorm evangelist.
For plugin support, please contact our support team directly, as comments aren't actively monitored.
One response to “Installing and Upgrading to the Latest Version of ACF”
According to WordPress.org news, the ban seemed to target WP Engine servers specifically, without impacting the ability to upload new plugin versions. It’s shocking that they didn’t allow the release of at least one final automatic update to switch the update servers.
It’s unbelievable that over 2 million innocent ACF users, who have no direct connection to WP Engine’s services or hosting, were affected by this decision. Especially considering that ACF didn’t violate any WordPress.org rules, there was no valid reason to disable the ability to upload new versions.
I hope that one day, an independent plugin repository will emerge, offering a robust recommendation and search system, along with detailed statistics for plugin authors – including traffic sources.
Thank you for your continued dedication to ACF, and keep up the great work despite the challenging circumstances!