How Advanced Custom Fields Can Improve Your WordPress Site

WordPress out of the box doesn’t come with much beyond simple blogging capabilities. But thanks to its flexible nature and the use of plugins, thunder::tech can create robust, full-featured sites on the same scale as any Content Management System (CMS). That’s where the Advanced Custom Fields plugin comes in. Advanced Custom Fields, or ACF, is a WordPress plugin that provides developers and website editors with a suite of fields and tools to streamline complex content editing. 
 

The Advanced Custom Fields WordPress plugin allows WordPress developers to assign fields and inputs to page templates and posts for CMS users to enter content. It gives developers the ability to add a variety of field types, such as text boxes and image uploads, without having to add custom code to WordPress. Because ACF has its own team of developers who maintain the system and manage the code, it is a much more efficient approach for us to use custom-coded controls and maintain the same code across many WordPress projects. Thanks to ACF, thunder::tech developers can focus time elsewhere on web projects to make sure the best end product is delivered.

With a ton of great features, ACF can help you too by making your site a breeze to manage. Fields like the rich text area and image upload allow us to expand on WordPress’s default set on inputs and give us the potential to have highly manageable and customizable templates that WordPress isn’t capable of by default. So your templates can potentially have multiple WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) areas or as many image upload fields as needed.
 

Another awesome feature that ACF comes with is an image gallery field. This field links directly in to your site’s media library and allows you to select as many photos as you want and all at once. With additional field control, such as limiting the photo dimension requirement for the gallery field, thunder::tech can ensure that your media gallery is clean and crisp.

 

Another game-changing field for WordPress development is the Flexible Layout field. This field actually consists of several groups of fields or modules that can be duplicated, omitted and reordered giving WordPress the content flexibility and modularity that so many CMS editors lack. This field also allows thunder::tech to set up several different modules for the flexible content field such as an image gallery module, a rich text area module and a repeating call-to-action module. Then you can add as many of the pre-set modules on your template as you want, and in any order you choose. When it comes to more complex template designs, this feature makes for endless possibilities.

Using Advanced Custom Fields to create content types can help to keep your CMS organized. Not only can ACF fields be assigned to unique post types, but they can also be assigned to templates. This can reduce the amount of custom post types needed to manage the content on a site and keep everything in one easy-to-find place. ACF also has fields that allow you to establish data relationships between posts. This opens up development possibilities for thunder::tech so that we can dynamically build page content and make content management less of a chore.
 

If you have a new thunder::tech WordPress site, then chances are you already have Advanced Custom Fields installed and running in your CMS. If not, then ask how we can make manageability easier for you!