What an adventure! ACF Extended is celebrating its 1.5 years of existence. Created in March 2019 to meet the needs of the most demanding ACF developers, the plugin has just passed the 20.000 active installations mark and is now approaching the stable version. Today, it’s time to talk about its future.

📜 A Brief History

In almost 2 years, the plugin has enormously grown in popularity. Despite the many sleepless nights and weekends spent developing this great tool, the enthusiasm of the community and the positive feedbacks from developers have kept me motivated to continue.

Thanks to the ACF Slack Community which I opened in December 2019, I could share my passion with many ACF developers around the world (almost 280 members ?). Through these exchanges, I understood that we were all thirsty for features that make our daily lives easier, as evidenced by the impressive list of Features Requests gathered on the Trello Board.

However, it is becoming more and more challenging to maintain a high level of support (+300 ticket answered), while integrating new functionalities, and reconcile everything with my professional and personal life. Today I know what I love to do: help developers get things done easier and faster. Being a passionate person, I want to continue on this path. Therefore, after careful consideration, I decided to launch ACF Extended Pro. In order to fully invest myself in this new adventure, I also decided to leave my position as Lead Dev in the great WordPress agency Pilot’in.

🚀 Stepping up with ACF Extended Pro

Following the plugin motto, ACF Extended Pro will keep the philosophy that made its reputation: advanced features, easy to use, and seamless integration.

This version will also be a guarantee of confidence for all professional developers, as it means constant monitoring, a better level of support, more documentation and regular features implementation. For consistency, prices have been modeled on those of Advanced Custom Fields Pro, starting at $49 for the Personal version and up to $249 for an unlimited number of websites for the Agency version.

💡 What about ACF Extended Free?

Obviously, some people may wonder about the free version currently on the WordPress repo. I want to reassure everyone right away, the support for the free version will be maintained, and the features currently available will remain so. Although some improvements can be added to the free version, major new features will be exclusive to the Professional version.

🛠️ Development Roadmap

The future development of the plugin will become even more exciting, since I will be able to concentrate all my time on it. The initial Pro version already includes no less than 11 new features. But this is only the beginning. Here is a small preview of what will follow in the coming months:

• Field: Flexible Content – Grid System
• New Fields: Phone, Country/Language, WPMU Sites, Image Selector
• Module: Dynamic Post Types – Manage built-in WordPress Post/Page
• Module: Dynamic Taxonomies – Manage built-in WordPress Categories/Tags
• Module: Emails – Manage WordPress email settings (SMTP, HTML Templating, Logs…)
• Module: Operations – Create, run & log dynamic scripts
• Module: Forms – Multi-steps, ajax submission, new Mailchimp action
• General: ACF/ACFE Settings – Enable/Disable settings from UI
• And much, much more…

I’m looking forward to discuss the future of ACF Extended and all of this exciting news with you. If you would like to share your passion for ACF with us, do not hesitate to join the ACF Slack Community! ❤️