I’m afraid I am missing the picture of this plugin.
I am looking for a sort of matching functionality, like in a marketplace for selling & buying cars, where the seller can specify the charcteristics of his car, and the buyer can search for cars meeting what he is looking for. Obviously the characteristics are defined upfront by the developer of the marketplace, and would with this plugin be defined with the custom fields.
I was expecting that this plugin would have easy ways:
– to create a form that can be displayed in the front-end (e.g. through a shortcode) for the seller to fill out.
– to display the values for the fields related to a specific post
– to show a filter mechanism for the buyer to search (also through a shortcode or something alike)
But instead it seems to me that a lot of coding is required, like for each field individually getting the value, displaying it.
Am I looking at the wrong plugin? Considering its name, and over 1 mio installations I find that hard to believe.
Any clarification is much appreciated.
ACF is a plugin that lets you manage custom fields in the admin, or optionally on a front end form. It does what any developer can do to create and manage information in custom fields, it just gives us a nice admin without us needing to build it. Think “Administration” of custom fields.
ACF is, from my experience, a tool meant for developers and used for building custom themes and applications.
It does not automatically show the content of fields on the front end of the site. This needs to be done by altering the code of theme templates.
It will not filter or search posts on the front end based on the content of the fields. For this you need to either build your own filtering and searching mechanism or use another plugin that is ACF “aware” like https://facetwp.com/
Thanks for getting back to me. I think I have to find another plugin then.
