ACF is Acquired by Delicious Brains!

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It’s been a decade since the first version of Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) popped onto the WordPress repository and since then, we have all been its ardent fans. The growth of ACF shows that there is real-world demand and a healthy future for bespoke WordPress websites. As ACF completes its 10-year milestone, its users are in for a pleasant surprise. Any guesses on what it could be? Well, here is the answer.

The Big News

Advanced Custom Fields, the plugin that made custom fields available to everyday users has now become a part of the Delicious Brains that offers developer-focused WordPress plugins. As most of you know, Delicious brains are the developers of some of the highest quality WordPress products such as WP Migrate Pro, SpinupWP etc, and are often mentioned in similar circles to ACF when discussing tools that developers can’t survive without. 

Delicious Brains is a fully developer focussed team and they are comfortable with large user-bases and unique challenges. So, it’s pretty exciting to think that a whole team of talent will now be contributing to ACF!

The Creator’s Perspective

ACF was designed and developed by Elliot Condon with the intention to allow users to add extra content fields to your WordPress edit screens. These extra content fields are referred to as Custom Fields and can allow you to build websites faster and educate your clients quicker. So, there is no doubt that ACF is a powerful tool in any WordPress developer’s tool belt and can give it the attention it needs to keep being successful. 

“Stepping away from ACF has not been an easy decision to make. The reasoning behind it comes from a place of humility. As the number of installs has grown from thousands to millions, the needs of the product have outgrown my ability to develop solutions. The last thing I want to do to this amazing community is unintentionally held back the project, so something needs to change.”

Elliot Condon, in his blog post

Change is a part of growth. While ACF had an incredible 10 year journey, Elliot realized that his personality and solo-work style is not compatible to take ACF forward. In order to expand, ACF requires a dedicated team, who are experts at handling things like development, support, marketing, and community building. So, a team like Delicious Brains is definitely not a wrong choice.

A peep into ACF

Custom fields are a form of meta data that can be used to extend posts and pages. They are very similar to stuff like publishing date, author, category, tag and other data that’s common for many WordPress content types. The ability to add custom fields is natively built into WordPress. If this can be done by WordPress by default or by hand, why the need for an ACF plugin? 

It’s because ACF basically provides an advanced user interface for adding custom fields to WordPress. Its main advantage is that Advanced Custom Fields has over 20 different presets for custom fields built-in, which makes creating them much faster and easier. Besides these handy presets, the plugin also lets you define rules to determine where they will show up inside the WordPress admin.

That way you can only show custom fields in certain post categories and otherwise keep the admin area free.

Final Thoughts

With a decade of development under its belt, and new torch bearers, Advanced Custom Fields is all set to get to grips with the content editing challenges of tomorrow. And as WordPress enthusiasts, we are also excited to see what the Delicious Brains team can bring to ACF and WordPress in the coming years.

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2 Comments

  1. WordPress wouldn’t be where it is today without ACF. Such a powerful statement and especially during the early days in 2013 it was revolutionary for what it is!

    1. That’s true! ACF’s contribution to WordPress’s growth is huge. I believe that ACF positively influenced other developers also to design better WordPress plugins.

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