Hi John,
Thanks for the extensive explanation. I can see that you really put a lot of thought into it.
My first thought when you say that you’re using a module/template-part for something as small as a link, is that it seems like overkill. But it probably has pros and cons, I guess.
We never went this far with components/template-parts and clone-able ACF option groups in our projects. It sure is an interesting approach and in the end it will probably save time, but it will take preparation to adopt it completely. We will consider it for future projects.
Although this is a nice insight, I still feel like ACF has a plethora of possibilities to make the user input a link, and none of them is ideal. The ‘link’ type comes very close, but has a problem that ACF probably can’t solve because it’s WordPress core.
Of course you can work around the problem by combining the 5 fields in a group and duplicating them wherever you want, but ACF is meant to make things simpler, right? This is a problem that every developer who works with ACF will need to tackle sooner or later. This feels like everyone has “to reinvent the wheel” while ACF could come up with a simpler solution.
In my opinion it would probably be best if this problem would be addressed at the root, instead of somewhere along the line.
