Is Advanced Custom Fields Pro necessary?

Pinegrow WP
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So, I’m following this tutorial: https://pinegrow.com/docs/wordpress/courses-tutorials/how-to-convert-webflow-to-wordpress-theme/

Presumably the later part is the same when making a theme in Pinegrow WP. In the later part of the tutorial, it also recommends using Advanced Custom Fields plugin in conjunction with PG. Is the Custom Fields Pro version is necessary for making WP themes in PG?

1 Like
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Hi @xphen0m,

It is not completely necessary no, however it does offer some huge advantages in your build. I’ll try to explain.

For a long time Wordpress (WP) allowed you to create custom fields for your posts or pages. That feature was removed in favor of Gutenburg approach, where you add blocks and elements that are NOT equivalent to custom fields. The Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin replaces that feature and it’s better than the old WP custom fields anyway.

The point of using custom fields is that you can create any layout you can imagine and display bits of content anywhere you need it. Otherwise you have to just output whatever is in the Gutenburg editor, referred to as the “content”. That’s fine for things like blog post, but not very flexible.

Since we can no longer add custom fields in WP without a 3rd party plugin, ACF is the best of them. You don’t need the pro version per se’. You can use the free ACF version. The ACF Pro version has some really nice features if you need those.

and finally…

If you aren’t creating custom fields in WP, you’re probably working on a smaller site. Maybe using Customizer and just outputting the excerpts, content, and featured image fields. without the need for custom fields. Or maybe you are integrating a page builder like Elementor and you don’t need custom fields so much.

Hope this helps!

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Thanks for the explanation.

I had 11 years of development experience when I stopped in 2011, and I remember my last website design using Wordpress, but I did not remember all that. Now I’m getting back into it, from what I can tell WP largely didn’t change much, but I noticed Gutenberg was a thing.

But anyway, I bought ACF Pro because what could it hurt?