Advanced Custom Fields Pro

Updated : 25-Oct-2022 by Elizabeth Jamieson

Advanced Custom Fields Pro is one of my favourite, go-to plugins, and is very useful for adding extra functionality to WordPress and can help you achieve very complex sites. However, I often use Advanced Custom fields for fairly simple things. For example, in the case where I want to specify a different hero image for each post.

So say my page layout contains a hero image, if I specified the image in the layout, the hero image would be the same for every post. If I set up an Advanced Custom Field for the hero image, then at the time I write the post I can provide a URL to an image to be used as the hero for that post. Then because the Advanced Custom Field is used in my page design in Oxygen, it can suck in the specific image URL on each individual post.

What About The Free Version?

The free version of Advanced Custom Fields is available in the WordPress repository, but the free version of the plugin does not include the following features:

Repeater Field
Flexible Content Field
Options Pages
Gallery Field
Clone Field
ACF Block Building - this reduces the learning curve for Gutenberg block building

So far, I've only used the Options Pages and Repeater Fields from that list. However I will at some point build blocks using the ACF Block Building facilities available with Advanced Custom Fields Pro.