Reply To: Modify Field Settings Form

• John Huebner

• March 23, 2016 at 10:17 am

I don’t know why it has not been implemented. It could be that the list of things that needs to be done outweighs the list of things that people would like to be done. For example the need for ACF to start using term meta because WorPress has now implemented it, I’m sure that this has a higher priority than adding a read only option to all of the field types. The ACF code is built and maintained by a single person. The fields work the way they are and with filters they can be altered to allow for things that most people don’t need. If something needs to be done and used on multiple site then a plugin could be built with the fields and filters that are needed to make it work.

As far a readonly being a setting in all fields but not in the interface, I’m guessing it’s because ACF uses readonly fields somewhere and ACF uses the same code for displaying the fields in it’s interface that’s used for displaying the fields we create. Another example of something that exists mainly because ACF uses it is the radio field with the add other value capability. This functionality is used on the date picker field and if not for the existence of the date picker field I doubt that is would be in ACF at all. There have been many requests for select and check box fields with this functionality and I know it’s o the to-do list, but other things are getting priority.

I’m not trying to make excuses, and I’m not involved with the actually development of this plugin, but being a developer myself that often needs to weigh and prioritize what I do, I can see why some things don’t get the attention that people may think they should.

To be honest, I’m glad that it’s possible to make changes because Elliot put in plenty of hooks to work with. There are a lot of plugins that don’t have the hooks that allow it. To customize the interface we have 2 choices, we can use the hooks that have been provided or we can can create new field types that add the extra features to the interface that we want.

At this point, the only choice you have other than using the hooks that are available and creating filters would be to hack ACF to add features to existing fields.