Hi Brad, first of all: Congratulations for buying this great software! It's also good to hear that you're having the ACF-Pro-Users in mind, as i'm one of them :) I don't know if you're aware of this, but on Facebook-Communities there are already rumors that you might want to stop the existing lifetime-licences for ACF Pro - maybe not in the near future, but a bit later. A loud and clear statement in this direction would help a lot. Thanks + best regards! Achim

@Achim: I think they already made their statement:

Lastly, and most importantly, we have no plans to adjust the pricing of ACF Pro anytime soon. If we ever decide to update pricing in the future, we won’t force existing customers onto the new pricing.

Existing ACF Pro customers should see no changes at all; you won’t even need to change your payment details. Everything will be business as usual.

@Delicious Brains: Concerning DX I would love to see a better more fluent way to define field groups via PHP instead if the big array version. I wrote a wrapper for it but would could to have this supported natively.

Wow, this is really significant! Thanks to Elliot for such an awesome product that is the cornerstone of everything we've done for the last 10 years. Looking forward to onwards and upwards. In terms of the lifetime licenses - I really wouldn't mind paying $100/year in the same way we do for GravityForms and others.

This is great news. A lot of the more uber ideas and UI / UX can be found in ACF extended .. so maybe integrate some of these natively?

I'd love to know the long terms plans given the EOL of the Classic Editor. For instance, would old sites based on ACF pre-Gutenberg still work? I have multiple large sites I manage that would be impossible to migrate to some future version that wasn't backwards compatible.

Wonderful news ! If anyone other than you was in the process of acquiring ACF, I would be worried, but with you I rest reassured ! Beware though, you have a great responsability , ACF is the core of many of WP installations (ncluding dozens of mine).

My input to the roadmap :

• native acf-json as default
• DON't Drop a good UI for classical Editor !
• better UI for relationship widget
• ACF options i18n handling (WPML+Polylang support)
• Native bi-directional relationship fields as option
• better integration of ACF Custom Database Tables by Hookturn (could be great complement acquisition target to achieve a truly professional platform :)

This is great! I'm excited for what y'all do with ACF, and I think starting with the developer content and UI improvements (I love the updated UI for WP Migrate DB Pro!) is a great idea.

Nice move!

Does it support Multisite? And is the Personal License for one domain (network) or a single site on a network?

I paid $100AUD in 2014 for my developer pro unlimited sites licence. I'm using ACF pro on 53 sites it seems. While I'm happy to not pay again, I understand that lifetime doesn't mean my lifetime, and I've been feeling a bit guilty about not supporting the developer lately.

If you guys add value and ask me to pay a subscription, I'll do it, just so long as we're still thinking about independent small business freelance developers building websites for clients with minimal budgets!

I install it on every site, just in case, sometimes I don't need it immediately, but it usually gets used eventually for those 'canyoujusts' that clients come up with.

Looking forward to seeing how it develops.

Thanks for keeping it safe for us.

Will the current lifetime licenses be honored after the sale is complete?

I am very happy about this. Two of my fave plugins and dev teams. what about some lifetime special offer? :-)

Neato. How soon can we expect Composer support? :D

Will you guys ensure that future versions of ACF still work with StoutLogic's ACF Builder? We use that on a lot of sites to programmatically add ACF fields through PHP via ACF's API, and would be a massive issue if it suddenly stopped working.

Wow, That's big great news! Congratulation!

I was excited about this acquisition until I heard they won't be honouring the early supporters with the developer lifetime license. I already hate them for this. Very sad, feels exploitive.

I can imagine there are going to be a lot of p****d off LTD owners if this isn't honoured

And there it is, there is already a plan to monetize early adopters > https://prnt.sc/13rxoxt Shows a complete lack of integrity to not make this public, most people have interpreted that you will honour LTD's. My response to this message is, no it doesn't sound fair, when you buy a business it would be fair to honour the existing agreement with customers and focus on making it better to continue to grow the plugin. I bought early when it was still a risk as the plugin wasn't mature, I have won and lost a few times with these types of situations, it's part of the process of supporting new plugins. It sucks when companies come in and erode this part of the WP ecosystem.

Congrats, Brad and team for the acquisition of ACF. For those of us who've bought the lifetime license, could we have the option of either opting in the lifetime license, or choosing to support your yearly renewals?

This means something like WooCommerce, where users can choose not to pay for major updates and still get their updates (which is what lifetime licenses mean, no?). I still get updates for my WooCommerce lifetime extensions.

However, I understand some of us here will want to support your business and would want to opt-in for the yearly renewals, and again, that's good for them, but not everyone likes that.

Appreciate your thoughts.

Leo from WPStarters

Congratulations on the acquisition. For our agency, we would appreciate a firm statement and commitment outlining your plans for the LTD purchasers and being grandfathered in to ALL updates, not just the most recent major version, which is just kicking the can down the road and not honoring the 'lifetime' portion of the what we thought we were buying.

Congratulations. I am so pleased to see ACF going to someone who can develop it further. I don't use it that much but I would feel lost without it.

I feel Leo Koo's suggestion of the option to get updates without support seems a fair one for the LTD purchasers.

fr

I must say after reading through the twitter posts that was well handled. It's great to see some real integrity and leadership trumping financial gain. I look forward to seeing what you guys do with it!

@Delicious Brains I'm excited about this change. It's great how much love Elliot put into this project and it will be interesting to see where you can take it from here.

One suggestion for the future. It would super nice to involve the community in roadmap decisions. Like having a site where people can suggest and vote for features. Instead of surveys which got mentioned in the podcast, just make those feature request commentable and there can be discussion there.

Things that already come to my mind:

• ACF Migrations: I think it's super important to have a way to migrate schema changes. On bigger projects it is almost impossible to change schemas without braking things or having data laying around that is not used anymore
• WPGraphQL compatibility: I think the future of WordPress is WPGraphQL and therefore I hope that every major change will be in sync with the ACF plugin for WPGraphQL.

If you do surveys or other ways of requiring ideas, I'd be super happy to contribute :)

Congratulations on the acquisition. Having used both ACF and Delicious Brains products on our network - i feel this will be the continued growth of something already great. Would love to see further work together with 'ACF Custom Database Tables by Hookturn' as well as a way to truely get ACF into source control. Good luck and looking forward to seeing the future of this great plugin.

This great news... now maybe we can finally get a developer who will fix an issue that developers have been BEGGING acf developers to fix for years! Why does ACF leave data in the DB after deleting / renaming custom fields? Why is there no setting (like in other major plugins) to delete it's left over data upon deletion of the plugin? See for yourself, we've only been asking for this for 7 years: https://support.advancedcustomfields.com/forums/topic/flush-unused-custom-fields/