Reply To: 5.8 Release

• jnicol

• February 22, 2019 at 11:44 am

I don’t think there is an official timeframe for the release of 5.8, but Elliot said on Twitter that he is aiming for February or March.

I have been playing with Gutenberg Blocks today in 5.8 beta 3, and it works really well for me.The post-TinyMCE world isn’t seeming quite as bleak now.

I see blocks and custom fields working in tandem, rather than having to choose one approach or the other. They fulfil different roles:

Blocks are useful for formatting a single “blob” of content, such as a blog post. They are a replacement for everything we would previously have put into TinyMCE (duh).

Custom Fields are useful for data that needs to be displayed or acted on outside of that “blob”. For example start and end dates for an event. Sure, you *could* save the dates inside a block, but it is much easier to perform date comparisons on meta data, the way we’ve always done with ACF.

At this stage my only gripes about how ACF integrates with Gutenberg is that the “hide editor” option doesn’t work, nor is it possible to display custom fields above the editor.

It is great to hear that Elliot is working on this, though (per the github issue that John linked to). If/when we can hide the editor then I think we will have arrived at a happy place.

In the meantime I came up with a workaround that effectively removes the Gutenberg editor, leaving only the title and ACF fields. The trick is to disable ALL block types for your CPT:

add_filter('allowed_block_types', 'my_allowed_block_types', 10, 2);
function my_allowed_block_types($allowed_blocks, $post) {
  if( $post->post_type === 'myCPT' ) {
     return array();
    }
}