I received a very concerning email yesterday as an Advanced Custom Field Pro license holder. This signifies a MAJOR shift in the foundations of WordPress.
Automattic has hostilely taken over Advanced Custom Fields, which is the most influential source of the WordPress’s success as a CMS system.
The Email on 10/13/24
Hi Kevin,
We are reaching out to you promptly and directly to address Matt Mullenweg’s unprecedented and appalling actions on Oct 12th to forcibly appropriate the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin and .org listing. The potential impact of Mr. Mullenweg’s improper action is that millions of existing installations of ACF will be updated with code that is unapproved and untrusted by the experts on the ACF team at WP Engine. We want to highlight how you can immediately reduce your exposure and risk now, and ensure you are using the genuine ACF.
If your website is hosted on WP Engine or Flywheel or you are an ACF PRO customer – you are not impacted and do not need to take any action.
If you have a website that is NOT managed on WP Engine or Flywheel AND are using the free version of ACF, in order to protect our valued users and ensure you have access to updates approved by the ACF team, we recommend you follow the one-time instructions outlined in this installation guide.
You can also follow the same process if your site has already been upgraded to the modified “Secure Custom Fields” plugin, to get back to a genuine version of ACF, and should not experience any loss of configuration or data while doing so before there is further change to the ACF code.
For a more in-depth overview of what has happened with the free ACF plugin and WordPress.org, you can read this post here.
The WordPress community has trusted ACF for over a decade and the expert stewards of ACF will continue to support and enhance the capabilities that our users love and trust. We are dedicated to continuing our efforts in helping you build incredible websites with ACF!
The ACF Team
Correlation of WordPress Growth & ACF Plugin Release Date
The Advanced Custom Fields plugin is a major source of WordPress’s success as a CMS. It’s release represents a pivotal turning point in WordPress’s adoption and CMS market share. Take a look below at the growth correlation between ACF’s release in June 2011 and WordPress’s rapid growth as the dominate CMS.
I was an early advocate for using meta boxes powered with custom fields, before ACF existed. ACF revolutionized this pattern, leading to a critical point in the growth of WordPress to become the dominate force it is today. The action to takeover this plugin is astonishing, and deeply concerning. I’m not sure what is happening behind closed doors at Automattic, but this move is unethical on so many levels and speaks to major shifts in movement.
As a final note, watch out Yoast, you might be next.