Advanced Custom Fields, or ACF, is one of the most popular WordPress plugins to date. It makes it possible to turn WordPress into a full-blown, custom-made content management system. How? By providing an easy way to add and manage custom fields. To use the content analysis of Yoast SEO in these custom fields, you need a plugin: ACF Content Analysis for Yoast SEO. As of today, two existing ACF glue plugins will come together in one official plugin. Here, we’ll shine a light on the open source driven development of this new ACF plugin.
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Why use Advanced Custom Fields?
Like the name says, the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, built by Elliot Condon, makes it easier to add custom fields to any WordPress site. While custom fields may sound boring on their own, they are used to extend WordPress. What’s more, people use them to build tailored solutions to, often, complex problems. Developers love these and use custom fields to develop new and exciting products on top of WordPress. By using custom fields, you can turn WordPress into a professional CMS that accomplishes all your needs perfectly.
What does the ACF Content Analysis for Yoast SEO plugin do?
The ACF Content Analysis for Yoast SEO plugin makes it possible for Yoast SEO to work inside custom fields. By using this plugin, you can use the SEO and readability analysis features of Yoast SEO to check your writing and SEO score, even if they live in a complex custom field.
Marcus Forsberg built the original ACF Content Analysis for Yoast SEO plugin. We later forked it to build our own solution. However, both plugins had trouble keeping up with the developments. Some time ago, we started a collaborative effort to make one, well-maintained, official ACF plugin for Yoast SEO. Viktor Fröberg, Marcus Forsberg, Thomas Kräftner and the great team at Angry Creative, helped us to merge two different ACF glue plugins and redevelop these into ACF Content Analysis for Yoast SEO. The team will update this plugin on a regular basis and offer continued support for ACF.
Version 2.0 of the plugin, available as of today, is rewritten from the ground up. It supports ACF 4 and 5. It offers stellar performance and supports more custom fields than ever.
Building something better, together
This is a collaborative effort. It is high time to put a spotlight on some of the team members that made sure two incredible WordPress plugins can start working together seamlessly.
Thomas Kräftner, freelance web developer:
“When Yoast SEO 3.0 came out I had a problem: I had just finished a site for a client that relied heavily on the now removed server-side analysis of content. Of course, the client wasn’t happy that all the work he paid for was wasted.
So we sat down and talked. I explained to them that they wouldn’t be the only ones with that problem. Instead of letting people reinvent the wheel, again and again, we should better make one generic solution. I proposed that my client would only pay a part of my development cost. In exchange, we’d make a completely free and open source plugin. And guess what – they thought this was a great idea!
I then also contacted Yoast, and at WordCamp Europe 2016 we agreed that they would also join in and help me maintain and support that plugin. It was a busy year, so it took until WCEU17 and also bringing Angry Creative on board to finally get us where we are today: The release of a true community built plugin.”
Viktor Fröberg, web developer at Angry Creative:
“At Angry Creative, we mainly do WordPress and WooCommerce development. As such, we often bump into both generic problems and specific problems that we fix by doing plugins. We also try to fix WordPress / WooCommerce core issues, but doing plugins helps us get solutions out there sooner rather than later.
We try to talk to our clients about the importance of open source and why this is valuable for them. A lot of our clients’ problems are shared problems, and by contributing our solutions to the community, our clients get free development time from other developers in the long run as they help improve the plugin. This pooling of resources benefits everyone.
This ACF Yoast SEO integration plugin was just like that. It was born out of a common need that almost all of our clients had. We’ve maintained it, and our clients have benefited from it. With the help of the awesome Thomas Kräftner and the Yoast crew the plugin is now better than ever, and together we’ll continue to improve it so that users can build their next big thing using WordPress with ease.”
Omar Reiss, CTO at Yoast:
“A collaboration like this is very dear to our heart. We get an incredible number of requests to add support for other plugins. At Yoast, we prefer such integrations to be backed by the community. We do our best to make it easy for third-party plugin developers to integrate with Yoast SEO. Whenever users request an integration, we mostly reach out to third-party plugin maintainers and offer our help and assistance in integrating with Yoast SEO. This works out well in many cases.
In this case, Marcus, Thomas and the folks at Angry Creative all separately leveraged the opportunity to create an integration between ACF and Yoast SEO. We happily brought everyone together to work on one integration to rule them all, reviewed, endorsed and distributed by Yoast, developed by the community.”
Open source driven development
The new ACF Content Analysis for Yoast SEO plugin is a solid piece of open source driven development. Ten developers from Sweden, Austria, and The Netherlands identified problems with the current implementation and stepped up to fix it. Working together with a fantastic team from around Europe and a shared open source mindset has made it possible for them to deliver fabulous work.
Open source is at Yoast’s heart. We try help others reach for the stars while continually improving our work. Projects like the ACF Content Analysis for Yoast SEO plugin give us the opportunity to learn from others and to contribute to the ever-expanding WordPress universe.
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Read more: ‘Why there’s only one model: the open source model’ »