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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. So today's episode is special for me since I get to talk about one of my favorite WordPress plugins, Advanced Custom Fields. Here to help me geek out is Ian Poulson, ACF Senior Product Manager. Ian, welcome to the WP Minute.
Iain Poulson (00:19)
Hey Eric, thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk about ACF with you as well.
Eric Karkovack (00:24)
Yeah, and it i it's been something I've been a involved with for a long time as well. And I I I do want to mention first though that WP Engine is owned. I mean, yeah.
ACF is owned by WP Engine, and they are a pillar sponsor of us here at the WP Minute. So we very much appreciate that and and all our sponsors allowing us to do what we do here. so I want to get started. I mean, we've kind of we were talking about this off the air that we've known each other a long time online, but that I think this is the first time we've ever interfaced face to face on a call. tell us a little bit about your
role with ACF and WP Engine in the larger scope.
Iain Poulson (01:11)
Yeah, so I'm the product manager for the ACF plugin at WP Engine. And for the longest time, I've been an ACF user. I was an ACF user.
probably 2012 onwards when an agency that I was working for introduced me to it. And it was one of those light bulb moments where, you know, as a developer back then, I knew how to code and I knew how to code a meta box and to create a field and kind of do those things that made it easier for editors to add some data. But I knew how to do that with code. And then somebody said, well, hang on, we use ACF because you can create these really easy UIs for your content editors to add the data.
and
you don't have to code it again and again, and you don't have to know how to code a complex date picker or map or something like that. And it was the light bulb moment of going, wow, okay, so I can actually, you know, I know how to do it basically and simply, but I can go further and just create these really cool things that.
also just get the configuration, get saved to JSON and I can commit that to Git and my other fellow developers can pull down. And it was just like mind blown how great that was. So I was a long time user, a long time super fan and to cut the short story, a long story short to get to today, I was working at Delicious Brains since about 2014 actually. And then we acquired as Delicious Brains ACF from Elliot Condon, the original founder developer
ACF Maestro, know, the legend that is Elliot, we acquired it and because I was a product manager at the time within Delicious Brains, a new Elliot, I took on ACF as part of the product that I managed.
and was just super excited to be working on it. Me and the developers were like, wow, this is the big one. This is so important to developers, to ourselves, to the community. And it was just really exciting to be able to kind of just get our teeth into looking after it, maintaining it, trying to improve it, trying to make it even more awesome. And then obviously a year later, we were required as Delicious Brains, the plugins, the people by WP Engine. And I've carried on that role with WP
VP
Engine, which was, this was 2022 now. So I kind of think it was not that long ago, but wow, boy, time is flying. So yeah, we've kind of kept going and we've tried to keep improving and we've tried to, you know, do everything with the love and the stewardship of ACF that we've felt because actually it's a really important plugin to everybody, including us. So yeah, we are here, we're in 2026 and we're dealing with everything that throws us from a web
and
perspective with AI and just how we navigate the future with technology and specifically WordPress. So yeah, excited to still be looking after ACF and making it better.
Eric Karkovack (04:15)
Well it's good. You've been you've been with this plug-in a long time as a user and as a product manager. So that that kind of gets me into I I want to take a little step back because I want to let people know that I I am a true super fan of this plugin. I actually worked with Elliot Condon way back to do some writing and some documentation with him back in the day. And this was when Gutenberg was just coming out, and I was one of the first people to see a demo of ACFP.
Blocks before it was made public, Elliot got me on a call and he showed me how this worked, and he said, Can you write a blog post about this, how this works, and what were plans are? And I'm like, my gosh, yes. This is like kind of a mind-blowing moment for me. And I think that a lot of developers out there have that same feeling. You know, there is a passionate user base. How does that affect your job? Because you had, I mean, this is like
Looking o over the the monarch's jewels or something, you know, like in terms of WordPress plugins, how does that affect what you do and and inform, you know, your next steps in in improving and maintaining what what's here?
Iain Poulson (05:30)
Yeah, think it's a double-edged sword. It's easy in one way because we've got a really strong, large user base, passionate users, developers that are working with the plugin that...
in terms of getting feedback about the product, it's brilliant, it's easy. We've got people on Twitter or X, people in email support, people in forums, people on Reddit. There's so much chatter around ACF. if that's good and it's bad, we hear the positive, we hear the negative, but we always hear things that we can do better. But we hear the feature requests and all of those things. So in terms of being able to listen to the community,
Product manager, that's a real luxury to have because we've got that mass of users that make it easy to hear and then respond to. But I think because ACF, sometimes it becomes hard because ACF is one of those plugins that's, it does a job very well, but it allows people to do lots of different things with ACF and they can build with WordPress and ACF in different ways. So.
in trying to target specific use cases and users, it's not as easy as one customer profile or user profile. There's actually people building with legacy, what we'd call legacy sort of classic, maybe with the classic editor, people building with blocks and ACF blocks, people building headless solutions with ACF at the backend, people using page builders that integrate really well with ACF and build that way. So there's, we talk
about in
there's many ways to WordPress. And ACF kind of supports all of those things and has done historically, but because we've now got like a very big user base, we have to continue to serve those users as well as moving with WordPress and how things going and, know, wider than WordPress when it comes to AI. But yeah, so sometimes I feel that tension as a product manager and I feel like...
We've got to help everybody, but obviously you can't help everybody as well as you want to all the time. yeah, mean, it's interesting you touched on ACF blocks as well. We've had some interesting things recently with that, just the way WordPress 7.1 has changed how...
the block editor area has been put into an
Eric Karkovack (08:03)
Yes.
Iain Poulson (08:04)
iframe with individual blocks as iframes, and that's kind of had a bit of a knock-on technical impact to ACF blocks used as running version two of ACF blocks. And we've had to do a kind of a quickish release recently to try and improve compatibility with those blocks. So we're trying to...
like we try to move with WordPress, but we also understand that our user base are using ACF in a certain way that works for them and it works for them as a developer and it works for their clients as content editors. And sometimes that means it's not exactly where WordPress is going because the block editor is very much a preview of your front end of your site and people have built.
editing screens with ACF for years and years and years, which are effectively data entry forms because clients just want simplicity. They don't want to design the website in their admin. They want to be able to just add the data that their developer has created a beautiful front end theme that will transform it and look like the website. so ACF blocks in version two can have that edit mode. And that can be a little bit tricky because they expect it to look as an edit form. But of course blocks.
and the WordPress block editor doesn't want to do that. So we, with version three of blocks, and I'll try and keep this short as well, just try to push in the direction that WordPress is going, but we're still trying to support users that are built in other ways. yeah, it's definitely, I mean, it's a great product to be part of and to be involved with, yeah, there's so many sort of widespread different usages and issues that come with kind of like almost backwards compatibility with
user experiences, does that make sense?
Eric Karkovack (09:49)
Yeah, I mean 'cause I actually was gonna bring up that that block editor
issue that came up with 7.1, and this has kind of been bubbling under the surface with WordPress for a few years now that the iframed editor wasn't going to work with version 2 blocks, and that's not just for ACF blocks, that's for any block that uses version 2 of the API. So you've come up with a solution that kind of retrofits these older blocks to use version 3, which works well. I I can
Tell you I've seen it on several sites that I've built. but yeah, I mean you're you're trying to keep up with WordPress, but at the same time, yeah, you have this user base that I mean, you know, there are certain things that I built with ACF ten years ago that are still running. And so that's that's gotta be a challenge to continue to support that.
Iain Poulson (10:46)
Yeah, it is. our version three of ACF blocks is actually really, really good for people who are building maybe new sites right now with blocks because you get the benefit of ACF blocks where you can create the block with a block.json file or with PHP. And all you need to build is the PHP, the render template that's going to be outputted. And so in terms of block construction, super simple, very portable, easy to commit to get version control.
share.
And so the development is easy, but the content edit experience is even better because you've kind of, we've moved away from the edit form. You've got the sidebar. It expands into this expanded editing panel that allows you to edit more complex field types. version three allows you to do things like inline editing. So if you do want your content editor to have a kind of, you know, they're editing a version of the site that they would see on the front end, but they can click and change text images right in the block editor.
the inline editing feature of Blocks version three is huge. It's so easy to use and a really nice editing experience that kind of almost keeps the block editor.
in a controlled fashion, like some developers don't want their clients to be able to move stuff around, paragraph block here and a column block over here. They want the rigidity of their design to be kept, but with the ease of editing that makes it easy for their content editors. So version three with inline editing, I think is a really good sweet spot between those two sort of frictions, the developer and the editor. But yeah, we know that...
builds of WordPress and different features of ACF like the flexible content field. We've not even talked about that. That is legacy as such, but it's still so powerful. And actually today, if I was building a site and I just want some simple things, which allows editors to have some control, I build flexible content field with some layouts because it's so easy to do and it's so easy to use. yeah, there's lots to keep up with. But we definitely try to, overarchingly try to keep every user
and the every use case kind of satisfied and supported. But we are slowly, you we've got to follow WordPress. WordPress is the platform. It's the core that we build on top of and we, you know, we use and everybody is using. So we try to make sure we're following in that direction.
but with the ACF flavor. We know what our users want, we know how our users want to build sites, edit sites. So we've always got that kind of the lens of ACF on top of where WordPress is going.
Eric Karkovack (13:31)
Yeah, I I would definitely recommend if anyone hasn't tried the version three of ACF blocks yet, and that inline editor, it is sweet. it kinda gets out of the way if you don't wanna be if you don't wanna edit something at that moment and it still maintains the look on the back end, which is really nice. but I did wanna get into I know ACF six point eight has been out and you've been continually improving
Can you t tell us, I mean I know I suppose to set the the foundation kind of of the future of this plugin. So tell me a little bit about what the a role ACF six point eight is playing and and what kind of things you're adding.
Iain Poulson (14:10)
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 Co 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 (17:21)
Yes, please.
Iain Poulson (17:23)
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. And the second feature was more about discoverability of your content on your site.
So it's a JSON-LD feature for schema.org or schema.org kind of JSON. So I think if you've used maybe like e-commerce plugins in the past, they will create a schema to describe your product whilst you're viewing that product page and it will...
Eric Karkovack (20:21)
Sure.
Iain Poulson (20:22)
create JSON that's in a certain format, it's JSON-LD, that will be output sort of hidden from the front end of the viewer, but it will be inside the page source and it will be readable by Google and it will sort of define what the product is with certain attributes. So Google will know, okay, well the name of the product is this, it's a type of product, the price is this, whatever. And that then gives Google in the past the information to be able to actually index it properly, maybe put it into the shopping.
tab of Google and that's using something called schema.org. It's a way to describe data in a classification. So what we've tried to do with that feature of ACF is, okay, we've got...
sites that are built with ACF, are building structured data. And sometimes you are building things that you have fields to describe that data. And so why not expose that in a structured way to Google and now AI indexers, crawlers, LLMs, everything that's going to take your data and regurgitate it into LLM results to people, search AI overviews, everything that will be kind of indexed from the front end or crawled from the front end of your
site
will appear in those results. So why not package it up in such a way that's so much more understandable for those crawlers and indexes to then give a better understanding of your content. And hopefully that means that because it understands it better, it will show it more, it will be more visible in search results. There'll be more things like citations, links, and yeah, so to make your content more discoverable.
And what that really means in practice is you've created a post type, for example, for recipe, because you're adding a load of recipes to your site. And each post for recipe has a field group with a number of fields to describe, know, my ingredients might be a repeater field, my time of, you know, time of cooking, time of preparation are number fields. And then what we can do within ACF now is to say, well, that...
recipe post type is a schema.org property or type of data of recipe. Cause there's a kind of a, you know, a data model within schema.org that has these objects that are typical car people, accommodation, things like that. And then for each field, you can give it attributes to link it to things like, okay, this is my ingredients list and it's a repeater. And inside here, it's
Item, number, quantity, weight or whatever or measure.
And so we're doing that mapping to describe our data in a schema.org flavor. And then the actual, the code then will output that on the front end when you're viewing the individual recipe. And then hopefully that becomes more discoverable. yeah, again, that's not really an ACF feature, an AI feature itself, but it's integrating with the world of AI because it's taking your content, making it more discoverable by search engines.
still will benefit from it even though we're in a world right now where Google is probably less important than LLMs but the AI index is the crawlers. GEO, AEO, all of the terms of now will be able to discover that data better. So both those features are kind of plumbing slash AI adjacent features just to try and future proof your sites either from a building point of view or a content discoverable point of view and improve them for the future.
Eric Karkovack (24:13)
that's a big deal with th with the schema markup because that used to take
an entirely different plugin to do that for you, like s some SEO plugins would do that for you. Or in in niche cases, and there's a lot of niche cases with ACF, you would have to build something yourself to mark that up. You might have to put that in in your rendering template for an ACS ACF block, for example, to mark up all that stuff. So that so that the plugin can do that now is pretty big.
I wanted to talk a little bit more about AI and and how you envision this working because it it's funny because we talked about the history of ACF and the passionate fan base. And so inevitably if there's going to be a split, right? It there's going to be those users that say, I do not want AI for anything. And then there are going to be users that say, Hey, you haven't added AI yet. What's wrong? What what sort of things do you envision folks being able to do with AI?
in the future here and how do you keep that balance with the people who maybe don't want AI in their plug in just yet?
Iain Poulson (25:22)
Yeah,
I think for both of these features that we've just talked about and things that we're building now and in the future, we're trying to make sure things are opt-in. You have to actually explicitly want to have this feature. We understand that some ACF users build in a certain way, won't need some of these features, won't want to go down that road. so feature flags, we're actually working on something at the moment where...
Previously with ACF, the way to control certain things would be through settings, but we would actually do it with filters or other sort of code to turn those on and off. And we've been using those kind of an ACF setting for feature flags in the past. And it's not the easiest thing to do. I mean, it's great for developers who just want to write some PHP in there, but maybe not for those users that aren't that comfortable doing that. So we're adding a settings page soon to the ACF admin to allow the most obvious and the most
kind of important settings just to be toggleable within the UI. So it's really easy to turn these things on and off. And when it comes to these types of features that are, you know, big and maybe potentially divisive with people who are like, I don't want that. you know, why would they give me that? It's a one click on or off and it's easy to kind of to have but and to not have. But yeah, when it comes to more AI things, we're...
what we're trying to think about. And we have got features that are on the roadmap and things that are in active development around using AI. But we are trying to be really mindful not to just to say, right, AI, yes, we know it's here. We love it. And obviously people love and hate it.
And the only way we're gonna do that is just slap a chat bot in the plugin. Like we are trying to avoid just obvious AI tropes, I guess, within product. We're trying to understand like, can we make, because...
know, frankly, ACF has always been around making developers lives easier to, you know, the big thing about ACF, I think for me for a long time was like, said, developer plugin, this is brilliant. And actually it's almost like a misconception. It's more a plugin that allows developers to make the content editor's lives easier. So we're sort of helping two sets of people here and it's all about making things easier. Like I said, at the start of the call, like I could code a meta box now with a setting for my field,
But why would I do that when I know I can use ACF to do it quicker, easier, cheaper when it comes to time and cost? So what we're trying to do with AI is actually look at specific workflows within the plugin pain points that we could just make faster. We could leverage AI to get you along that journey of building faster and getting you to kind of like the value that you see with ACF, but just quicker. Because the big thing for me at the moment
and the thing that we are currently working on is if you're building out your content model, and we talked earlier about the Abilities API, you could get Claw to do that right now. So we've already made that easier. But if you're still wanting to kind of do that yourself.
and you create your field group, it's a click, add in the title of the field group, add field, you're then adding the title for the field, you're dropping down and selecting the field type, maybe adding, if it's required or not, some defaults, and then maybe you do that 20 more times. That's actually quite a lot of clicks. It's quite a lot of configuration time spent when actually you're probably creating fields that are quite typical for the thing that you're creating the field for. So if it's a movie website, for example,
or recipe, the fields that you're adding to add that custom metadata about that object are going to be quite typical. So we're ending up building right now some AI assisted workflow improvement around the field group creation. Because if you are going in and you're saying, right,
I've created a post type called movie or movies and it's gonna be, it's gonna hold my movie database. And now I wanna create my field group to add some data around that movie.
I mean, nine times out of 10, it's gonna be year of release, director, and I could go on and on, but it's typical. And so maybe we can leverage AI to give you those suggestions around what you would want to add, what you maybe would already have thought to add, and maybe things that you may not have thought. And then you can quite quickly, easily pick and insert those fields. And suddenly the field group creation is much easier. go from a, and this is how I,
people describe AI, it's like the benefit of AI is going from the blank.
page to something quicker that you can refine and tweak and edit rather than going, now I've got to start from scratch and the blank page is, you So it's the same with the field group. We can give you a suggestion,
Eric Karkovack (30:20)
Exactly.
Iain Poulson (30:21)
suggestions of 10 fields and you'd be like, yeah, of course I want that one. Yeah, yeah, definitely. That's good. Yeah. Well, don't, don't want that. Yes, I'll add that, but I'll edit the options later or something like that. And so it's so much quicker. So that's, that's kind of where we want to go looking at certain workflows that are tedious, I guess, and can be important.
to speed it up with AI, but in a mindful way, rather than like, okay, so we're not slapping stuff on, we're not forcing it on people, the features will be opt-in, they will be, you know, I think this isn't definitely not.
down to me, but from our product designer, from our engineers, the way we have always made UI changes has been thoughtful. We've tried to look at use cases and tried to look at how to make experiences better. And it will be the same with AI. So the JSON-LD feature, there's a lot of mapping going on there. There was a lot of thought that goes into that to make that a usable feature. And so the same with the AI workflow pieces where AI will not be intrusive, it will be additive, it will be helpful.
it will be kind of, you know, elegant to a degree where we add in bits of the AI into the UI. And so hopefully it won't disrupt user experiences, it will help. So we're really conscious of that. We're not trying to add AI for the sake of AI. And when we do add it, we'll be adding it in a way that is genuinely useful. So to develop workflows, and then maybe content editor workflows, because people are going to be creating content in a very different way nowadays, like
writing things and you yourself will know as a writer like you're writing in a completely different way because we have these tools at our disposal so how do we integrate that into their workflows to make things easier because why make it harder when they have to go on elsewhere to generate content and bring it across and so there's things that we want to explore that way but it will all be about making lives easier with AI assisted features.
Eric Karkovack (32:23)
Yeah, I
I love that. I I because that's it's really kind of the ACF way if I look when I'm thinking about it, because this is a plug-in that has always had that that level of stability. I could always count on it. And I think that's what so many developers have have stuck with it over the years, because we can count on it. We know that tomorrow ACF is still going to work and whatever features it adds, it's not going to be cumbersome, it's not going to get in the way of of completing our tasks. It's likely, you know, if we
something we don't need, we can simply ignore it, but otherwise it's going to make life a little easier. And you know, I think that's just kind of keeping in in in with your personality, I guess, of the plug-in, if if that makes sense. so I appreciate you know that the fact that you want to do it in a way that people can opt out and that people you know can pick and choose what they want from the plug-in.
Iain Poulson (33:20)
Yeah.
Yeah, it's always been a bit of a Swiss army knife, isn't it? How you can choose certain parts, some field groups, can upgrade to pro and get more field types. You can choose how you build with it. So yeah, we want to be respectful of that still. And there's gonna be times when, because the world of AI is fast changing, the world of WordPress is fast changing, we're gonna probably try and release things faster than we've done before and iterate and listen to
feedback
and try and change and try and improve and hopefully don't disrupt too much because as I said it will be opt-in. So yeah this is interesting times but hopefully we'll do it in a way that is in keeping with ACF as a product and as a way we've developed in the past and I think that's going to be really key for lots of plugins and products in the space right now when it comes to AI because
Eric Karkovack (34:13)
Absolutely.
Iain Poulson (34:14)
you you could argue that why do I need this plugin or why do I need that plugin because I can just go and code it with
something else. I can go and build it with Claude or I can vi-code my solution over the weekend. But actually...
know, features, products that they can't be vibe coded when it comes to the level of care and the kind of the reliability that you're going to get from teams that are building and you know, the products and they are the genuine authority for that plugin and they're going to be safe and trusted because agencies need to choose or freelance developers need to choose solutions that are going to work for them and they can rely on rather than, know,
I've just
quickly spun up this thing but next week it breaks and I've got to maintain it like that is
Eric Karkovack (35:02)
Yes.
Iain Poulson (35:02)
the whole reason why software development teams exist and products exist and that's true in the world of AI and it was true before so hopefully we can continue to make things easy for developers just to use and love and you know have integrated into their workflows so ultimately they can build websites for clients and you know continue to serve their clients and we are just assisting in that journey.
Eric Karkovack (35:28)
Well absolutely. I I I know and I know we talked a little bit about user feedback earlier. I did want to end on on this that the ACF user survey is out and available now. tell us a little bit about that, how folks can get involved and what kind of feedback you're looking for.
Iain Poulson (35:49)
Yeah,
so the annual survey is something that we've, when did we set it up? We created it, I think in 2013. Yes, and we've been running it ever since. So this is our fourth year of running it. It's a,
five to 10, well, 10-ish minutes survey that we love to send to people and get their feedback on kind of how they use ACF, what field types they use, what features they use. It's a great place to give us feedback about anything that they want to see improved or, yeah, any feedback that they can send directly to us. But it's a really good way for us to understand how things change over time, like how you're building with WordPress, how you're building with ACF, what kind of sites you're
You know, like are the more we I mean it's great for data from us but like looking back over the last four three years how people change with building classic themes versus block themes and just trying to understand how the world is going because yeah the the use ACF user base is large so it's really good for us to be able to kind of cast that net of feedback even bigger than people who are coming to us we want to ask it from from the people using it and just try to get a really good
balanced insight into how the plugins being used and how WordPress is being used so we can try and stay ahead. So yeah, that survey is open now. You can get the, we'll probably hopefully post the link, but it's on the website. And
Eric Karkovack (37:20)
Yeah, absolutely.
Iain Poulson (37:22)
yeah, it's.
It is really helpful for us and of course we've got all these other channels of communication so if people are just listening going, right, I really wish they would do this but I don't know how to tell them, then come to our website. We've got the contact form, we've got X, we've got the survey as well. So yeah, we do want to hear from people.
Eric Karkovack (37:40)
Awesome. I yeah, I imagine that that goes in and and influences some of the decisions you've had to make over the last few years.
Iain Poulson (37:47)
Yeah, definitely. And nowadays with the current 2026 survey, we've got questions around AI that we wouldn't have had in previous years. So things change and then that gives us the ability to kind of hear and try and roll with those changes. So yeah, it is really helpful for us to kind of inform our roadmap and see where things are. So yeah, very helpful.
Eric Karkovack (38:12)
Alright, well folks, go out there, take the ACF annual survey. we'll put the link in the show notes. And where else can people get a hold of you and and maybe pick your brain for with ideas for the next iterations of ACF?
Iain Poulson (38:26)
Yeah,
I mean, the best place to get me is still X. I think I am polevaultweb, one word, obviously, on X. we are wp underscore ACF is the ACF handle. And I'm on that, managing that account all the time. yeah, send us a post on X and we can start a conversation.
Eric Karkovack (38:51)
Awesome. Well well thank you for your time. Thank you for filling us in on what's new with ACF. And to everyone who watched and listened to this episode, thank you. Visit us over at the WPminute.com slash subscribe. Grab our newsletter, and hey, visit our pillar sponsors while you're at it, including WP Engine, the owner of ACF. Thanks, and we will see you again next time.