Advanced Custom Fields

We are experiencing major admin-side performance limitations when using large-scale ACF Flexible Content implementations for enterprise page-builder architectures. After profiling and testing extensively, the bottleneck does not appear to be server-side. The primary issue is browser-side rendering and initialization within the ACF admin UI. Currently, Flexible Content appears to initialize and render all layouts and nested subfields immediately, even when layouts are collapsed. As the number of layouts and nested fields grows, this causes: * very large DOM trees * high browser memory usage * expensive JS execution * slow editor interactions * long admin load/render times * degraded scalability over time This becomes particularly problematic for enterprise/editor-heavy implementations where: * Flexible Content acts as a centralized component/page-builder system * layouts are intentionally reusable across multiple templates * editors require access to all layouts within a unified builder * content teams collaborate across many departments * websites evolve continuously over multiple years * new layouts/components are added regularly In these scenarios, splitting layouts across multiple templates is often not a practical architectural solution. We believe ACF would greatly benefit from performance-focused rendering improvements for Flexible Content, such as: * lazy loading flexible layouts * rendering layouts only when expanded * virtualized rendering / virtual scrolling * partial DOM rendering * deferred field initialization * async or chunked hydration * pagination/incremental loading similar to Repeater pagination * mount/unmount lifecycle handling for collapsed layouts * background field initialization * deferred React rendering strategies Even partial-loading approaches would significantly improve scalability and long-term maintainability for large ACF implementations. At the moment, all layouts appear to initialize immediately, which creates substantial performance overhead once projects reach enterprise scale. This feature would greatly improve ACF’s suitability for large-scale page builders, enterprise editorial systems, and long-term evolving websites.

Currently, ACF provides no built-in way to expose custom fields in WordPress's Quick Edit panel. Adding this requires significant custom code workarounds. Add a per-field option (e.g. a checkbox in field settings) to enable a field in Quick Edit. Basic field types — text, number, select, checkbox, radio — would cover the majority of use cases. This would save editors a lot of time when bulk-updating posts and is a frequently requested workflow improvement.

Hello Advanced Custom Fields Team, I’d like to suggest an improvement that could make ACF more compatible with modern AI-assisted workflows. Today, many developers and non-developers are using AI tools to generate HTML layouts and page structures. While this speeds up UI creation, they still need to manually recreate matching ACF fields one by one in the admin panel, which can be time-consuming. 💡 Proposed Feature: “Add Fields via Code” Option It would be extremely helpful to have an option where users can quickly define multiple fields using a simple code-like syntax. For example: country_location:text full_address:text opening_hours:text event_date:datepicker 🔧 How It Could Work Add a button like “Add Fields via Code” or “Bulk Add Fields” in the Fields UI. Users paste a structured list (like above). ACF automatically parses it and creates fields with: Field Label (auto-formatted from name) Field Name Field Type 🚀 Benefits Saves significant time when creating multiple fields Works seamlessly with AI-generated layouts Reduces repetitive manual setup Makes ACF more beginner-friendly for users coming from AI tools Encourages structured, consistent field naming ✨ Optional Enhancements Support more field types (text, textarea, image, select, repeater, etc.) Allow JSON or YAML input formats Provide preview before creating fields Enable export/import of this format for reuse This feature would make ACF even more powerful and aligned with how developers are working today using AI-assisted tools. Thank you for considering this idea! Best regards, [Ravi]

Biggets headache we face with clients is them struggling to crop their own photos for staff, partner type card post types that show an image thumbnail. Allowing them to upload photos that crop to the right size where they select the focal would be a huge value add!

Similar to https://github.com/hirasso/focal-point-picker , add a focal point picker for images when adding them via an image or gallery field. Output the relevant coordinates in the image array or via wp_get_attachment_image.

Hope it's ok to suggest a bunch of additional field types in one post. I think these would be very nice to have natively in ACF (Pro). Structured Address. A dedicated field with sub-components (street, city, postal code, country, etc.), optional autocomplete/geocoding, and structured return format. Ideal for directories, stores, or contact data. Phone Number. International phone input with country code selector, flag display, and automatic formatting/validation (maybe using libphonenumber standards). Prevents messy free-text entries. Code Editor. Syntax-highlighted editor for code snippets (HTML, CSS, JS, JSON, PHP, etc.) with language mode selection and basic linting. Useful for embedding custom code or templates. Date/Time Range. Single field for selecting a start + end date/time pair (returns as array/object). Reduces the need for two separate fields + conditional logic. Advanced Link. Enhanced version of the Link field with additional options like aria-label, custom CSS classes, rel attributes (nofollow, etc.), and internal/external toggle. Slug / Permalink. Auto-generates or allows manual editing of a URL slug with live preview and validation. Great for SEO-focused custom post types or sections. An optional button to generate a unique and random slug would also be very helpful. Columns / Grid Layout Helper (admin UI only) Allows grouping fields into responsive columns (example: 50/50, 1/3 splits) directly in the edit screen for cleaner layouts without custom CSS. Enhanced Media Fields (dedicated Video/Audio or extended Attachment) Better previews, automatic metadata extraction, focal point support, or stricter file-type controls. Other nice-to-haves: Dynamic/computed field (values auto-calculated from other fields). Better multi-select taxonomy with hierarchy and search improvements. Read-only/hidden field with more flexible display options.

Instead of storing field data in the post meta table, store the field values in a custom database table. This reduced performance issues and makes the data easier to query.

I’d really appreciate it if an Open Street Map field were developed. The current ACF OpenStreetMap field plugin available in the WordPress plugin repository is buggy. It also has weird search/autocomplete behavior. The map overlay selections break if you disable any of the parent options. There is no way to set a default map overlay. I like that they offer an Aviation data overlay (Open AIP) but there again, there is no way to set this as default. I explored using Metabox since it has an OSM field. This is overall a better implementation. However a critical feature that seems to be lacking in the Metabox implementation is to import the lat long in decimal format with a comma in between and have the location automatically show on the map through a CSV import. I have a database with over 13,000 records that I need to import. While it is not important to have all the overlays available in the ACF OpenStreetMap plugin, they’d be a nice to have feature. The critical thing is the autocomplete/search function as well or better than the Metabox implementation and the ability to import the lat long into a field and just have it work. It does not seem as though the ACF OpenStreetMap plugin is being updated regularly. The last update was updated 9 months ago and the bugs I encountered were reported months ago.

The Pods plugin has this functionality and it is very useful for the users when editing content: Let users create new posts in a Relationship field. I think it is a "must" when talking about UX in the admin panel.

This makes it easy to group options within a select, as described in the MDN HTML docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/optgroup There are a variety of requests for this in support forums on ACF's site and WP.org , as well as various janky workarounds like this: https://wptips.dev/how-to-create-acf-nested-select-optgroup/ Proper support would be great!