Support

Account

Home Forums General Issues Please provide advanced documentation Reply To: Please provide advanced documentation

  • I think you are right: my tone was inappropriate. I suppose I was frustrated at the time having to read through ‘update_field’ for the hundredth time.

    Ultimately I believe two things though.

    1. The ACF team do what they do for profit and there is nothing wrong with that. The free version is an on-ramp to the amazing full version which is ultimately a consumer product. While I agree with you that the prices are ridiculously low, this is their chosen business model and it doesn’t change the fact that they are selling a product and providing follow-up services, most of which, like this forum, are fantastic. Bottom line, ACF is not a charity organisation or NGO. The low price does not excuse deficiencies in the product.
    2. Secondly, any decent documentation should specify the parameters and return values in a systematic manner, eg: https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/update_post_meta . This is standard practice across the coding world because it is so obviously necessary. ACF has been around long enough to simply lay out these items in a standardised way for the sake of developers. I don’t think it is too much to ask. If it were an open source project I might consider changing the docs myself.

    I agree with you that I am being fussy but I stick by my point that the ACF team should improve their documentation, or provide supplementary advanced documentation, for the sake of their developer customers. Simply specify the full set of parameters, return values, types, caveats, etc.