Reply To: ACF Group Field – I wish it had been implemented a touch differently

• John Huebner

• October 2, 2017 at 4:37 am

I know this isn’t going to help, but, I for one will never go back an rebuild an admin based on the availability of new field types. There wasn’t a field for grouping when I built the site and I probably designed the admin as well as I could given what I had to work with. It could be that you don’t do the kind of work that I do. I build many many sites and the client pays me to build them. I then maintain the site, but extra hours to rebuild the admin are not usually in the budget. Once the site is built, that’s it unless the client wants to pay me to make additions or changes of some kind. At that time I’d look at it and determine if it would be more cost effective to make changes based on new fields or stay with what it was. Constant restructuring of data is not something that I want to do.

There was recently a similar discussion that had to do with converting a repeater into a flex field, something else that can be done but not easily. Again, can I do it? Yes. Will I? Not very likely, simply because rebuilding the data to use the new field is not cost effective.

I’m not the developer, so I can’t say why they went with the implementation they did, but I do know quite a bit about the way ACF works. I can guess that it had mostly to do with using structures that already existed. The group field is nothing more than a repeater field that always has exactly 1 row. Using an existing structure rather than implementing a totally new one not only reduces the work to build it in the first place, it also reduces the work of maintenance. I think there may be 2 developers now so I think that maintenance time is always going to be something that is considered. I know that it’s something that I seriously consider when someone asks me to add a new feature to one of my plugins and one of the reasons that I purposefully keep the scope of any plugin extremely narrow.