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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today's episode features a segment from my interview with Ian Poulson, the Senior Product Manager of Advanced Custom Fields. Ian stopped by to chat about ACF's role in the WordPress development space, its careful adoption of AI, and what the future holds. I do want to note that ACF is owned by WP Engine, a pillar sponsor of the WP Minute. We appreciate their support.
Now, you can catch the entire episode over on our WP Minute Plus channel. Visit the WPMinute.com for all the details.
Iain Poulson (00:38)
Yeah, so 6.8, I think it came out sort of end of March, April time now, so it's a little while ago, but 6.8 was a slightly different release in the sense that we didn't focus on an ACF feature, we didn't sort of look at a new feature or improvement to existing features. was a point where we looked around and thought, where is things going with WordPress? Where are things going with AI? And how can we kind of help and set some foundations, as you said? So the two main things of ACF
6.8 were we added abilities. So what that means is with WordPress 6.9 that came out a little bit earlier or around the same time, they added the core API of the abilities API, which is adding tools and for want of a better word, abilities to the site that then other tools could connect to, agentic tools.
The way I've used it myself, and I think this is probably best way to describe it, is that the Abilities API is the plumbing that things like MCP can sit on top of, and then you can connect your agentic tool of choice. I love Claude Code. I would connect Claude Code to my site via MCP, and I've been using the main MCP plugin from Automattic, I think, or the WordPress team. And the Abilities within your WordPress site core registers its own abilities.
plugins can register their abilities, and then you can start doing stuff by saying, right, I am connected from Claude to my site, go and do something on my site. And Claude, or the agentic tool, will know what it can do, and it will know the data that it can play with, read, write, and go and do things on your site. So what we've done from an ACF point of view is to add that extra plumbing and registered custom abilities for ACF. So my...
My Claude code can talk to my ACF site, or my site running ACF, and it will know exactly what field groups I've registered. It can create field groups. It will know what post types that have been registered. It can register a post type. It will do taxonomies. And it will have all of that information about the structure of the site, the content model effectively. And it can read and write the data. So.
In terms of like a concrete example, I've done this before on our monthly Chat Friday session where we kind of do an open Zoom with people who want to come talk to the ACF team. But we do, I've done a demo where I've connected the site, got Claude Code running and said, right, this is an empty site, but I want it to be a property rental site for Portugal, somewhere in Portugal. And at that point, Claude is like saying, well, I actually could help you with the data model.
you create a post type of this for properties, taxonomy for a way to group them and some fields. I'm like, okay, that sounds amazing, thank you. But now you're connected to the site, tell me what you can do on the site and it will go and inspect the abilities and it will find out all the tools and it will say, right, I can actually do this for you. Do you want me to do it? I'm like, yes, go and do it. Yeah, and
Eric Karkovack (03:33)
Yes, please.
Iain Poulson (03:35)
it will register the post type, it will register the taxonomies, it will create the field group, connect it to the post type.
register all of the ACF fields. So it knows the 30 plus field types. It will create the, you know, the.
the type of how many bedrooms number or slider or range slider. It will add a gallery field for all the photos of the accommodation. And it will give me a very data rich content model about a property rental site. And then I think in the demo, I've given it a spreadsheet that has all or CSV file that has dummy properties with the data. And I just give it to it and say, now you've created the content model, fill in the data. And suddenly I've got a site that is
up and running. So yeah, I mean, that's one example of using it, but having an agentic tool know about your site and know about the content model, the structured data, the stuff that ACF is very important with for creating and maintaining is really powerful because you could throw anything at it and you could do it at the start of a build. could have a client that's given you a spreadsheet and says, I want a website that's going to house all of this data.
and instead of you having to parse the data and understand what the data model should be, you can just give it to Claude or your tool of choice and it will do the analysis and give you the rationale behind what the content model should look like and then go and build it and then go and import it and then suddenly you just need to build some stuff around it. yeah, the abilities API and hooking into that part of WordPress is really important and I think that's kind of foundational to
having sites being connected. You can do that in production, you can do that on your local, but it's just a way of giving your tools easy access to do things without having to kind of, I don't know, cobble stuff together with CLI commands or REST API things. And it knows exactly, you you say, want a new field group and it will know that we're talking about an ACF field group and it will know the tool to call to actually create that field group. So yeah, that was...
That was the first part of the ACF 6.8 release. And it wasn't like an AI feature for ACF. This is just pure plumbing. Like you don't have to necessarily use it in that way, but it's making the connection really easy.