Upgrade Guide - ACF PRO

We have moved away from selling individual add-ons towards an all inclusive PRO plugin!

Because ACF PRO is a single plugin combining ACF with all our premium features, we can deliver a higher standard of product including:

1. More features, more often
2. Better compatibility
3. Faster updates (less plugins)
4. Faster websites (less assets)

To learn more about premium features, please checkout the ACF PRO page.

Welcome to the future! ACF version 5 is our latest architecture powering both our free and PRO plugins.

Although sometimes confused as the same, ACF 5 is simply "version 5" - the next major version scheduled for release this year and currently available via Early Access. ACF PRO is our professional plugin that combines ACF 5 with our premium features such as the repeater field.

Now that ACF PRO is distributing our premium functionality, we will no longer develop individual Add-ons and will eventually remove them from the website.

After updating to ACF 5, you will be prompted to upgrade the Database.

This is a necessary step to migrate across your field and field group settings from version 4.x. This upgrade will also copy across any taxonomy term values from the 'wp_options' table to the 'wp_termmeta' table.

No data is deleted or modified during this upgrade.

No changes to report here 😁. You can expect every get_field() and the_field() to work just the same!

Field Group settings are saved in the wp_posts table (same as before) but with a post_type of 'acf-field-group' (previously 'acf'). New settings have also been added including Active, Label Placement, Instructions Placement and Description.

Field settings are now also saved in the wp_posts table with a post type of 'acf-field'. New settings have also been added including Wrapper Attributes, Return Type and many more depending on the field type!

Taxonomy term values are now saved to the 'wp_termmeta' table (previously saved to the wp_options table). No change is required to template code as the database upgrade will copy across all taxonomy term values to the wp_termmeta table.

ACF 5 includes the Select2 JS library for powerful AJAX based selection in many of it's field's (select, post_type, taxonomy, user)!

ACF 5 produces new and improved HTML, CSS and JS throughout the plugin allowing for a faster experience and better customisation! Within these changes is a different class naming for field wrapper elements:

This change looks like <div class="field_type-{$type}"> to <div class="acf-field-{$type}">, and although minor, may cause issues with existing custom CSS and JS. If your theme relies on the old class names, you can easily add them with the following code:

/* Enable ACF 4 class names */
add_filter('acf/compatibility/field_wrapper_class', '__return_true');

Field values are now sent in the $_POST data using $_POST['acf'] instead of $_POST['fields'].

ACF version 5 includes a .json based export and import tool. Previous version of ACF used the WP .xml export which is currently not compatible. We will be working on a solution for this shortly!