I am looking to include ACF Pro as part of a custom WordPress theme, following the instructions included in this article in order to do so.
It’s working great, but I’ve noticed that the ‘Updates’ page appears to be missing.
The article linked above mentions including the below code to hide this page deliberately, but this isn’t something I have included.
add_filter('acf/settings/show_updates', '__return_false', 100);
Does anybody have an idea of why this page may be missing? I have tried changing the filter to __return_true to get this to show but to no avail.
For reference, I am using the latest version of ACF Pro (6.1.7)
Any help would be much appreciated!
ACF cannot be updated normally in WP when it is included as part of a theme. ACF uses the WP system for updating plugins and this cannot be done if ACF is not installed like any other plugin. In order for the client to update ACF you must manually update your version of the theme and provide during a theme update.
This is one of the issues with including any plugin as part of a theme rather than installed as any other plugin and is one of the reasons that many themes now have dependent plugins and install those plugins into the WP plugins folder.
Good to know, and thanks for coming back to me!
What about adding in a licence key if I don’t have access to the updates page? I know that licence keys can be included manually in the wp-config.php file, but this falls outside of the theme file structure so I wouldn’t be able to include this as part of my core theme files.
Would I need to do manually add this licence key on a site-by-site basis, or would I simply be able to ignore adding any licence keys onto a site entirely, providing that each client has purchased their own copy of ACF Pro of course?
The only purpose that an activation key serves is allowing updates. The presence of or lack thereof will not alter the functionality of the plugin.
As far as defining the license key using a define( 'ACF_PRO_LICENSE', '[key]' );, this would only be relevant if you are going to have your theme install ACF Pro like any other plugin. I believe that doing this would be against the ToU Rules.
- ACF would no longer be part of your theme
- You would be sharing license key information
Your only real choices are to include it in the theme and provide ACF updates via whatever method you plan on to provide your premium theme updates or require that the person that purchases your theme also purchases a license for ACF Pro.
I could be wrong about this, I’m just another user and that is my interpretation of the rules. You might want to contact the developers by submitting a ticket in your account to verify my interpretation.
