Create field type in theme (without plugin)

• heyjones

• September 21, 2018 at 3:31 am

I’ve been able to create new field types by using the starter kit (https://github.com/AdvancedCustomFields/acf-field-type-template), but I have a situation where I need to create the new field type within a theme. I’ve tried porting the code over but I keep running into issues with object declarations. Has anybody done this before? Ideally I’d just have a PHP file for each field type and the JS would be handled in the theme (I’m enqueueing an admin script for the theme).

• John Huebner

• September 23, 2018 at 2:26 am

Can you give more details on the issues your having?

• heyjones

• September 25, 2018 at 6:49 am

I think I got it figured out… I ended up with the following file structure:

wp-content/
↳ themes/
   ↳ [theme]/
      ↳ acf/
         ↳ assets/
            ↳ css/
               ↳ [field].css
            ↳ js/
               ↳ [field].js
         ↳ fields/
            ↳ [field].php
         ↳ json/
         ↳ init.php

In init.php I’m setting the acf-json directory, and also including my fields:

add_action ( 'acf/include_field_types', 'acf_include_field_types' );
function include_field_types ( $version = false ) {
  if ( $version == 5 ) {
    foreach ( ( array ) glob ( get_template_directory() . '/acf/fields/*.php' ) as $field ) {
      include $field;
    }
  }
}

Then, in the field class that extends acf_field, I just removed $settings from the __construct() call and defined them in the $this->settings variable:

$this->settings = array (
  'version' => '1.0.0',
  'url' => get_template_directory_uri() . '/acf/',
  'path' => get_template_directory() . '/acf/'
);

So going forward, I should just need to create new PHP, CSS and JS files for each field type. Hope this helps someone!