Reply To: Flexible Content vs. Blocks?

• John Huebner

• February 3, 2021 at 9:07 am

You have it exactly. Our clients want to be able to add and move around various elements but they want each of the same type of element to work and look exactly the same every time they are used and they don’t want their employees putzing with design elements and they also don’t want to put many hours into training them on their company’s design guidelines.

The issue with dealing with React is that it is a completely different development process that increases dev time, especially when you have a team of one. When you’re in a business where you need to deliver a web site at an affordable price, and withing a short timeframe, increasing the development time increases cost to the client and increasing cost to the client means that you do not sell custom web development.

Many developers, from what I’ve seen and read, are either doing what I’m doing, using some other page building plugin/application for WP, or they are just leaving and many that can do so are going to ClassicPress. I would do the same but the company I work with also depends on several plugins that will not work in ClassicPress and there isn’t any plans to make them work, so I’d have to build anything that I need, once again increasing cost that we need to find a way to pass on to the client. Yes, there are some people using blocks and they are using ACF to help them achieve this because Elliot has taken part of the pain out of the equation by adding blocks capabilities to ACF. My biggest issue with doing this is the fact that my clients are businesses that usually need advanced sorting and filtering capabilities and blocks store all of their content in the “post_content” row of the post, making sorting and filtering based on these fields nearly impossible without jumping through a lot more hoops.

The thought of WP dropping the classic editor is why I don’t use it. WP includes a classic block, this means that as long as this exists TinyMCE will be a part of WP. As long as TinyMCE is part of WP there will always be a WYSIWYG editor in ACF.

As far as the viability of the flex field. The biggest reason that ACF Pro is popular is because of the repeater. A Flex field is actually a fancy repeater that allows different sub field for each row. While a Group field is actually a cut down version of a repeater that always has exactly one row. If you take the repeater out of ACF then there’s really no Pro. The death of the repeater would likely mean the death of ACF.