Reply To: Many of the same clone in another set of fields

• John Huebner

• April 2, 2020 at 5:57 am

For the most part using a group or using prefixing in ACF does the same thing to the field name. But there is one difference that can effect coding.

I generally use group fields and I will explain why.

Usually I create a template part for showing content from a clone. Think of it like a component.

So let’s say have a clone with just one field in it named “field_x”

If I use clone prefixing then my code will change every time I use the clone so that I can call “prefix_1_fied_x”, “prefix_2_field_x”, etc.

If I use a group field then I can do this

if (have_rows('group_z')) { 
  // always true, a group field is a repeater that always has one row
  while (have_rows('group_z)) {
    the_row();
    get_template_part('template-parts/components/my-component');
  }
}

and inside the my-component.php file I can always call

get_sub_field('field_x')

no matter what group it’s in. for one or two fields maybe not a big deal, but if you have 10 or 40 fields in your clone then you only need to code a new loop to call the component template rather then re-code all of the field calls to use the new prefixed field names.