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Building microsites with ACF

  • I want to create a website that has a parent area and subordinate topic areas. Each of these topics should have its own menu, pages and posts. This sounds like a task for WordPress multisites, but I wonder if you can do this with Advanced Custom Fields.

    I imagined that you would create a custom post type called microsites and each post contains the microsite-name, menu ID and ACF color pickers for customizing the look of a microsite.

    According to this superordinate custom post type, a new custom post type with its own admin area is then created on-the-fly in a loop for each topic or microsite, in which only the topics of the respective area are displayed and not all together, as is the case with wordpress pages.

    My problem now is that I can’t estimate how WordPress behaves when you have 50 different microsites and 50 custom post types. Does this make the system much slower, or is there some form of caching for calls such as register_post_type and adf_add_local_field?

    Alternatively, I could also imagine using the existing Pages and Posts and integrating a dropdown for the topic at the top of the admin area, just like WPML did with the languages. Then I would only need an ACF field that stores the assignment to the respective microsite. And I would have to adjust the SELECTs somehow, which then load only the posts/pages of the currently selected microsite.

    Have you ever done this before?

  • Seems as groove planning problems, overly and unnecessary complicated.

    50 custom post types, says you have problems with ideas and imaginating website.
    On the fly is not possible to make them. As I am aware of it. Some developer needs to set all custom post types once and for all.

    ACF is not meant for styling (micro)themes.

  • I would use multisite. As @stagger-lee says, I think the plan is overly complicated. I would use parent/child themes. In some cases I have allowed clients to alter some specific details of a theme, for example colors an such, but ACF is not what I would use for a theme engine, unless you plan on spending many months making it work.

    That said, all of what you’re saying is likely possible, with enough work. You could create custom post types on the fly using values saved to some type of options page. This would have an impact on site performance. Using ACF to build custom post types would be very inefficient. I don’t even use plugins for creating post types, at least not in production. I use CPT UI for creating them but always move the registration of post types to code to reduce the number of queries needed on every page load.

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