Advanced Custom Fields is a WordPress plugin which allows you to add extra content fields to your WordPress edit screens. These extra content fields are more commonly referred to as Custom Fields and can allow you to build websites faster and educate your clients quicker. In this guide, you’ll learn how to:
- Install the ACF plugin
- Create new fields
- Create field content
- Display fields in your theme
- Register custom post types and taxonomies
The Basics
Custom fields are a native part of WordPress and appear on pages, posts and custom post types, however, the native custom field interface is not very user friendly. With ACF installed, you can tailor what fields to show and what they look like. For instance, you may require a ‘Hero Image’ to be selected for your home page. You can use ACF to easily create this Image field and show it when editing the home page! Here is the difference between native custom fields and Advanced Custom Fields.
With your fields created, it’s time to start editing your content! All our fields are very intuitive to use and display seamlessly with the WordPress admin style. You don’t need to trigger any event to show or edit custom fields, they will appear and function just like the WP post_title and post_content fields! Simply enter your content and update the post!
Displaying field values is ACF’s party piece! Any field value can be returned as a PHP variable or output as HTML via the magical functions get_field() and the_field(). These functions (alongside many others) provide a developer friendly way to customize your WordPress theme without spending hours reading our docs! Here is some example code to see how our intuitive API works!