Advanced Custom Fields Tutorial
Advanced Custom Fields or ACF is a WordPress plugin created by Elliot Condon that allows developers to create custom inputs in the WordPress admin panel and add these fields to your website using PHP code.
It’s available as a free and premium plugin. The premium version is called Advanced Custom Fields PRO and starts at $49 for one year of updates on a single WordPress website. The benefit of using the pro version is it can help speed up the development process due to the extra fields & features it offers such as PHP blocks, repeatable fields, and custom options pages.
Some of the fields that can be added using the free version include images, text, links, and images and for smaller sites, this might be all you will need for the development build. In general, developers won’t charge for using the Pro version as it is in their interest to get the job done quicker.
Updating ACF Content on Your Website
So, you’ve had your new website for a few weeks, and you would like to update some of the content yourself. The following tutorial will show you how to find and update ACF fields on the pages or posts of your site.
I will be using the Yummy Pixels food and travel blog I built to show you how to find and update custom fields. There are a couple of ways we can find out where the article is located in the admin panel.
The first would be to find the URL in the browser address bar, in this case the URL is https://www.yummypixels.co.uk/travel/myanmar-burma/. The second way would be to look at the breadcrumbs located at the top right of the page, as you can see from the image below, the breadcrumbs are showing Home » Travel » Myanmar (Burma) Itinerary.
The article is all about travelling to and through Myanmar and is split into days and sections, each have their own set of custom fields. The section that we will be looking at is Day 1 of the itinerary as shown below.
Ok, so now we have some idea where to find the article in question, we can open the WordPress admin panel. This site was created using custom post types and this post type was named Travel. You can find these articles by clicking on Travel in the main admin navigation menu on the left, then clicking on the Myanmar (Burma) Itinerary post to be able to edit it.
To edit the Day 1 section in the article, scroll down on the page and find the panel that’s named Travel Article and the content that we want to update is located under the Travel Leg 1 tab. We can now change any of the text or the image for that section then click on Update at the top of the page and these changes will be updated on your live website.
It is best practice to try and keep the text to a similar length and adding images with the same aspect ratio to avoid breaking the design of the site. You should also make sure you check that everything looks good on the front-end after updating.
If you don’t want to update your website content yourself, get in touch with us for a quote or maybe think about one of our maintenance plans that include some content updates each month to keep your website updated with fresh content.
I hope you have found this article interesting and useful, thanks for reading.