From the course: WordPress: Advanced Custom Fields

Exploring advanced features of ACF - WordPress Tutorial

From the course: WordPress: Advanced Custom Fields

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Exploring advanced features of ACF

- [Instructor] Advanced Custom Fields is a powerful, free plugin available on the WordPress plugin repository that can help us greatly expand our content. In addition to that free plugin, there's also a premium version, ACF PRO. ACF PRO includes extra fields and features that don't come in the free version, like repeatable blocks, page building layouts, the ability to generate Gutenberg blocks without JavaScript, and much more. Let's go ahead and download and install ACF PRO. You can purchase ACF PRO from advancedcustomfields.com, and once you've completed the purchase, you can go to your account page and download the Advanced Custom Fields PRO zip. Make note of your license key, which we'll need later. Once we've downloaded the zip, we can go to our WordPress Dashboard and add a new plugin. So we'll go to Plugins, Add New. And then we'll click Upload Plugin. We'll choose the zip from our desktop or downloads folder. And then we'll click Install Now. Once it's installed, we'll click Activate Plugin. Note that once ACF PRO is installed, the free version is no longer needed, but it's not disabled. So we'll go ahead and deactivate that now. It should not cause any conflicts, but we just want to be safe. To activate updates and support, we can go to the new menu under Custom Fields called Updates, where we'll paste in our license key. And then we'll click Activate License. Once we activate ACF PRO, if we go to the Fields Group and select Add New, we could see all of the new fields that PRO has activated. What sets these fields apart from the free offerings is their ability to create incredibly flexible advanced layouts. For example, we have the repeater, the flexible content and clone. The flexible content field for example, acts as a blank canvas for your post or page. You can completely replace the content editor and use that to create advanced layouts. ACF PRO also lets you create a theme option section, which means you could store global information like header and footer text. This can help you transform your WordPress site into something much more dynamic and flexible without the need to install other plugins. This is also the perfect place to add scripts like Google Analytics. As you'll see, ACF PRO also comes with another powerful feature for repeatable data.

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