ACF Chat Fridays: Smart Field Suggestions Preview and Developer Q&A

ACF Chat Fridays give the Advanced Custom Fields community a chance to hear directly from the team behind the plugin. The October session focused on essential security updates, wrapping up our fourth annual user survey, and an exclusive demo of an upcoming AI-powered feature designed to speed up field group creation.

Whether you’re looking to secure your sites, curious about generating complex field groups straight from a client brief, or interested in the long-term roadmap for custom database tables and design-to-code tooling, this session was packed with insights for developers.

Hosted by Iain Poulson and Matt Shaw.

Session Recording

Watch the full session below or jump to the highlights in the summary.

Session Summary

Our discussion covered everything from important core and plugin patches to leveraging AI tools for field creation, architecture, and local development. Key topics included:

Security Updates: A reminder to update all environments to the latest ACF 6.8.10 security release.
Smart Field Suggestions: A live demo of an upcoming ACF PRO feature that generates complex field groups from basic prompts or client briefs.
Developer AI Workflows: A community discussion on Model Context Protocol (MCP), the Abilities API, and bridging the gap between Figma designs and ACF JSON.
ACF Annual Survey: The survey has officially closed, and a full data readout will be presented at our November session.

ACF 6.8.10 Security Release

It is important to keep your environments up to date following the recent release of ACF 6.8.10.

This security release addresses reported vulnerabilities and ensures compatibility across environments. It is strongly recommended to update all local, staging, and production sites immediately to ensure your builds remain secure and supported.

Sneak Peek: AI-Powered Smart Field Suggestions

An experimental workflow enhancement coming soon to ACF PRO is Smart Field Suggestions.

Building out field groups with dozens of nested fields requires extensive manual configuration. Smart Field Suggestions brings an AI-powered modal directly into the ACF admin to automate field creation while keeping developers in complete control.

Completely Opt-In Architecture

Smart Field Suggestions will be disabled by default. Developers can enable the feature during the experimental phase by adding a filter to their theme’s functions.php or a functionality plugin:

add_filter( 'enable_smart_field_suggestions', '__return_true' );

A toggle will be available on the upcoming dedicated ACF in-admin settings page, removing the need for custom code for users who prefer configuring settings inside the UI.

Context-Aware Field Generation

The feature does not require prompt engineering to be useful. In the demo, a new field group was assigned to the existing events custom post type, titled ” Event Details.” Without entering any instructions into the optional prompt box, the AI evaluated the post type title and its registered description to instantly suggest:

Start and End Date/Time pickers
Event format and registration status fields
A Group field for “Venue Details” (complete with address, map, and virtual meeting URL fields)
A Repeater field for “Event Speakers” (including name, title, company, bio, and headshot fields)

Developers can iterate on the suggestions. By appending “include fields for an event sponsor” to the prompt modal, the engine automatically generates a sponsor Group field with nested sub-fields and pre-populated tier choices in a Select field.

Scaffolding Directly from Client Briefs

The tool also handles unstructured input, which was demonstrated by pasting a raw, unedited client brief directly into the prompt box for a work post type:

“Each case study should include a client name and logo, an industry, and the services we delivered…”

The tool parsed the brief and generated structured fields accordingly, creating a formatted client group field and a pre-configured checkbox field for services delivered (strategy, branding, web design, SEO), utilizing proper ACF key-value formatting:

strategy : Strategy
branding : Branding
web_design : Web Design
seo : SEO

Fields are loaded directly into the standard ACF field group editor with a review banner, allowing you to reorder, tweak, or add validation rules before anything is written to the database.

Choosing Your AI Integration Route

The conversation broadened into how developers are using AI across varying stages of the build lifecycle:

Workflow Method	Best Used For	How It Works
Smart Field Suggestions (UI)	Rapid prototyping in admin	Uses WP Engine’s managed AI API inside the ACF admin modal to scaffold fields with zero setup.
Abilities API + MCP Adapter	Headless / Agentic site builds	Connects external agents (like Claude Desktop) to WordPress and builds CPTs, field groups, and imports CSV content via prompt.
Local JSON + Code Editors	Git-first agency pipelines	Prompts code-focused models (Cursor, Claude Code) to output raw ACF Local JSON files directly into your theme repository.

Community Q&A Highlights

Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Figma-to-ACF Workflows

During the community discussion, one attendee proposed connecting Figma directly to ACF via MCP tools to automatically translate designs into field groups.

While Smart Field Suggestions targets the UI builder, the team is actively tracking design-to-code pipelines.

Developers can already pair the Abilities API (integration introduced in ACF 6.8) with the MCP Adapter plugin, enabling AI agents like Claude to scaffold post types, taxonomies, and field structures locally before deployment.

Dedicated Custom Tables vs. Post Meta

Another question was posed on whether ACF plans to store custom field data in dedicated custom database tables rather than bloating wp_postmeta.

Custom database tables remain an active exploration on the long-term ACF product roadmap. The ACF team is evaluating solutions for performance challenges posed by complex data structures when sharing post meta tables with third-party plugins.

Local AI Models and Enterprise Security

Regarding local models and enterprise data security, V1 of Smart Field Suggestions utilizes WP Engine’s hosted AI API. Supporting “Bring Your Own Key” (BYOK) providers or local LLM instances will be evaluated based on initial user adoption and agency security compliance requirements.

Admin UI Markup and Editor Experiences

A question was asked about modernizing the admin-side markup used to display fields, noting that the Classic Editor still relies heavily on HTML tables.

The team is exploring markup modernization to improve responsive layouts across custom dashboards. Concurrently, ACF is working to improve how page-level metadata appears in the Block Editor—by moving crucial fields out of hidden bottom panels and drawers to improve the content editing experience.

Troubleshooting the Schema.org Filter

During a live troubleshooting segment on the enable_schema filter introduced in ACF 6.8, it was shown that programmatic filters in functions.php must register the custom post type with ACF first to ensure proper initialization timing.

Wrapping Up the 2026 ACF Annual Survey

The fourth annual ACF User Survey has officially closed! Thank you to everyone across the community who took the time to share their feedback.

A comprehensive readout of the survey findings will be presented during the next ACF Chat Fridays session on Friday, November 6th.

Resources & Links

Our next session is scheduled for Friday, November 6th, featuring the full results and readout of the 2026 ACF Annual Survey.

Tag or message us on X with suggestions or feedback using #ACFChatFridays.