We recently released our first Premium WordPress plugin – ACF Theme Code Pro . You can read the story behind the plugin below ; )

A couple of months ago I was chatting to a good buddy of mine – Ben about an idea I had to save developers time when working with WordPress & the awesome Advanced Custom Fields plugin.

The Problem

It can be time-consuming to implement the fields you’ve created with Advanced Custom Fields, especially if you’re working with a team on a complex project.

Most WordPress developers that I chat to have code snippets, keybindings or other workflow shortcuts that will help create the code they need to implement a particular feature or field (this includes myself up until recently).

Snippets can be great, it means you don’t have to memorise all of the features of an API. I created my own snippets for most of the ACF field types, I’ve used them for the last few years and I’ve had the fun of migrating them each time I switch code editor.

When implementing a field within a WordPress theme, it’s likely I’ll forget the field name, was it ‘profile_image’ or ‘profile_photo’ ? I’m also likely to forget how I’ve set that field to be returned, was it ID, URL or Array ? I found myself constantly editing the field group to find out. I’d then have to remember the shortcut for my snippet to get the code for that type of field with a specific return format. If I was missing a snippet I’d have to jump over and search the ACF docs!

Our Solution

To solve this workflow ‘problem’, Ben & I decided to create (another) WordPress plugin and we called it ACF Theme Code. It generates the code needed to implement ACF in WordPress Themes!