Reply To: ACF Pro 101 and advanced use?

• John Huebner

• December 15, 2017 at 3:53 am

The font end performance of these huge pages was and is still good and there is no performance issues with them because of some optimization, for example ensuring that WP gets all of the post meta values in a single DB query (get_post_meta($post_id)). And in many cases, all of the content is not displayed. In the scenario given, the client wanted to be able to create “Pages” where each page could be shown independently but also wanted to allow site visitors to “Show All” pages. 90% of the time only 1 row of the repeater is ever needed. However, the display of all pages only takes a few millisecond more than showing a single page. This was a case of solving the problem bass ackwards. I created a editor to hold all of the pages and then split them up into single pages where I should have created a separate editor for each page and then combined them for the “Show All” option. It was a learning experience. My goal was to make the site easier for the client to edit because I thought (knew) that having to edit multiple documents and set the correct display order would confuse them. Also, there were SEO considerations since we wanted the “Full Article” page to be indexed and not the individual pages and this was easier for me to do if all the content was associated with a single page.

As far as back end, I usually use “block” display on repeaters, and I try to make it look as presentable as possible working within what ACF provides, I have not tried the new “Group” field yet. I have done some customization to ACF when I think it’s necessary and to make it less confusing when I thing it’s needed, but this is rare. Going back to the same example. The 7 WYSIWYG fields could be laid out is several specific ways, I provided a radio button to select the “Layout” and using conditional logic showed an image that represented that layout. I could have gone further and actually set the content fields to be positioned as they would be on the site, but they weren’t paying me enough to go that far.