Yeah, this is a bit of a pain point for us as well.
We have local / test / production environments, version control with multiple developers, and managing ACF custom fields is a bit of a pain.
– Using the PHP export is ok, but means that other developers can’t easily add fields without changing the export file directly. We can get round this by using the XML export, but then we have to take steps to not include the PHP field definition file.
– If the local development instance where we used the UI to create the custom fields is lost, then we lose the ability to change the fields in the UI without working through the PHP export file and recreating the fields in the UI.
– We get weird issues when we have UI defined fields and the same PHP defined fields: sometimes fields get doubled up, sometimes they don’t.
It would be fantastic to fix some of these issues, we’d certainly pay for an add-on that sorted out these issues and made ACF even more developer friendly.
