Advanced Custom Fields is a powerful WordPress plugin which allows you to create custom fields for your website. The simple and intuitive plugin lets you create unlimited number of fields and use them in different ways.
In today’s post, I will show you how to use the Advanced Custom Fields WordPress plugin. Let’s get started.
Installing the Plugin
Before doing anything else, install and activate Advanced Custom Fields in your website.
This will create a new menu item titled ‘Custom Fields’ in your website dashboard.
Creating a New Field
To create a new field, go to Custom Fields > Custom Fields and click the ‘Add New’ button. This will take you to a page like the following –
You will find three main sections in the page – Fields, Location and Options. I will discuss all of them one by one.
Customizing the Field
First of all, provide a name for the field group. Choose the name carefully so that you can identify this group easily.
Then, you can add new fields by clicking the ‘Add Field’ button. Clicking the button will open a drop-down section like this –
Among all the options, the first three are compulsory. ‘Field Label’, the first option is the name which will be displayed as the field title in the post editor. ‘Field Name’ will be used to retrieve the information of this field.
Then, you have to select the field type by clicking the drop-down list. You will find a detailed explanation about the various fields in the plugin’s official documentation.
Then, you will find other options to provide instructions, make this field required, provide placeholder text, prepend or append text to the input value, apply HTML formatting, impose a character limit, apply conditional logic, etc.
After making the necessary changes, click ‘Close Field’. You can add more fields by clicking the ‘Add Field’ button. As you add new fields and close them, they will be added to the current field group. If you want to edit any field, hover over the field name and click ‘Edit’. You will also find links to make a duplicate copy or delete the field.
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Setting up the Conditions
Advanced Custom Fields allows you to set up various conditions for displaying the field groups. You can select to display the field group in various places including posts, pages, attachments, taxonomy pages, user profile and for the logged in user types. It is also possible to combine multiple rules for displaying a field group.
To do that, click the ‘and’ button and specify the condition. In order to remove the additional conditions, click the ‘-‘ button.
Other Options
Lastly, you will find some customization options in the ‘Options’ section. The ‘Position’ field allows you to choose where the field group should be displayed. The available options include – after title, after content and side.
From the ‘Style’ section, you can choose to display the field group without any styling or display it with WordPress metabox styling.
By using the ‘Hide on screen’ option, you can choose to hide specific elements in the post editor screen. This section allows you to hide the permalink section, content editor box, excerpt, comments, revisions, tags, categories, author, etc.
Exporting Field Groups
Advanced Custom Fields also lets you export the custom fields. To do that, go to Custom Fields > Export. You can select which field groups to export and in which format that will be exported. If you want my opinion, ‘Export to XML’ is the easiest option here.
Final Words
So, that is how you use the Advanced Custom Fields WordPress plugin. As this post was intended for the first-time users of the plugin, I intentionally limited the discussion to the basic usage only.
However, if you are still confused about anything discussed above, or want to know more about a feature, let me know by leaving a comment below. I will be glad to help you.