Slides from our talk at WordPress North East's virtual meet in May 2020. We talk through the options to adding custom fields to your WordPress website, and focus on the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin, comparing it to Custom Post Types (CPTs). The majority of this talk was a live demonstration of ACF in action, which is not included in these slides.

1. A WordPress case study
WordPress North East
May 2020
Virtual Event @PeacockCarter

2. Think about a typical web
page
What content fields does it
support?

3. A typical web page in
WordPress
- A heading / title
- A featured image
- Some content

5. What if you wanted more
types of content in a page?

7. How would you add these?
Would they be editable?

8. You could use…
- A custom page template
- Widget Context plugin
- Page builder theme
- Advanced Custom Fields
- Custom Post Types (CPTs)

9. Advanced Custom Fields
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10. Advanced Custom Fields plugin
- Allows you to add custom
content fields
- Free & “Pro” versions
advancedcustomfields.com

11. You can add custom fields…
…per page, post, page
template, post status, user, …

12. A custom field can be…
- Text
- WYSIWYG
- Page links
- Images
- URLs
- Google Maps

13. ACF Pro version has:
- Page building tools
- Repeater field

14. ACF vs Custom Post Types
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15. Custom Post Types
- Allow you to create a
structured type of page with
different fields for data

16. Custom Post Types
- Can be added via plugin or in
a theme’s function.php file

17. ACF vs CPT
Advantages Disadvantages
Advanced Custom Fields • Great for “one off” fields
• Good for lists within a page
• Easy to reorder content
• Yet another plugin!
• Not great for filtering fields
• Not designed for large amounts of
data – gets slow!
Custom Post Types • Ideal for content displaying in
more than one place in your
website
• Allows grouping of similar content
• Filterable
• Bit more involved code-wise

18. Demo time!
(What could possibly go wrong?)
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19. Questions?
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