Editus / Aesop Story Engine or ACF Flexible Content

sage
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I downloaded the latest Sage book yesterday and noticed this paragraph:

Advanced Custom Fields is a popular WordPress plugin that’s used to create custom edit screens. Instead of having hardcoded data in your custom page templates, use ACF to create an easy-to-use interface for your site editors to manage custom content.

Which seems to suggest using ACF flexible layouts.

As a CMB2 user, I’ve not really had chance to play with flexible layouts but if you guys are using it then I’m there. I just wondered if anyone has any experience of using Editus with Aesop story engine?

https://edituswp.com/
http://aesopstoryengine.com/

It seems that the main difference is that Editus/ Aesop stores the layouts in the WordPress content field, whereas ACF uses post_meta. Also Editus is pricey, but still GPL licensed.

Should I just use ACF for this?

Any insights or advice on best practice in this area gratefully received…

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I use ACF flexible quite a lot, i created about 15 modules that are like mini layouts which can be put together. So with ACF i added my own css (bootstrap) and template files which i then reuse on other projects etc. You could also create separate page layouts and use templates for each page.

I like that approach as i have really clean markup and css in those templates. I have all the control. I used visual composer and didn’t like that approach of putting everything inside a content editor using shortcodes with it’s own framework of CSS and grid etc. It’s almost like having foundation and bootstrap together which makes no sense.

The main problem or feature people want in ACF is to make partial templates for example a button with settings and if i had 10 modules with those settings i’d need to go into each layout and change/add/remove fields if i wanted to change anything. Lot’s of work.

There are solution but it’s not something ACF gives out of the box, there are addons like Reusable field Groups but work a bit differently.

You may also want to check https://piklist.com/ although i haven’t used it but people tend to like it very much and it says it has that partial functionality ACF is missing.

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One more addon for ACF with a great documentation https://github.com/fewagency/fewbricks

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Wow, thanks.

fewbricks could be exactly what I’m looking for.

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I’m a dedicated ACF user, I have a large library of flexible layouts I pull from for every site I build. My only problem with ACF is the lack of a front-end editor, it’s something a lot of my clients have been asking for.

Anyway, here’s another ACF plugin which helps with reuseable groups: https://github.com/Hube2/acf-reusable-field-group-field

So you create a group called “button” once, then you pull that
into any other group that needs a button. Works well for me.

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I use ACF’s Flexible Content ALL the time for locking down layouts and giving clients a really nice editing experience. Gonna have to check out fewbricks.

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Ping @etc as he knows a ton about Aesop (he’s a core contributor)

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Thanks for the ping, @austin.

Of the two, I actually think ACF is likely the better solution in this case.

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Well that’s it, straight from the horse’s mouth, thanks @etc.

@JulienMelissas I spent yesterday taking a good look at fewbricks. I also contacted the developer.

It’s a really clever project but it is young and with only one contributor. I’m going to give it a go as an experiment.

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I just stumbled upon Carbon Fields. Haven’t tried it yet but at least on paper looks promising as an alternative to ACF or Piklist. The thing it has going for it, is the (nested) Complex Field, similar to a Flexible Field in ACF, which is currently missing in Piklist (afaik).

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@richardwilis looks great, thanks for sharing :smile:

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That looks a lot nicer than CMB2 for devs that wanna use code to build out meta fields. Thanks for the link!

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Compare WP - Plugin Comparison - Content Type / Custom Fields
 gives a thorough feature breakdown of WP custom field plugins.

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