• I was surprised to find that the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin on my site was replaced with Secure Custom Fields (SCF) without my consent. The new plugin doesn’t meet my needs, and I prefer the original ACF plugin. I hope to see this issue resolved so users can choose which version they want to use.

    Moreover, this abrupt change has severely impacted my trust in the SCF plugin itself. Having a plugin I depend on replaced without clear communication feels misleading and unprofessional. Trust is essential when using plugins that play a critical role in my site’s functionality, and this experience has made me doubt the reliability of SCF. I would much prefer to continue using the original ACF plugin developed by its trusted author.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Fortunately, the ACF people have addressed this but it does mean heading to their site and downloading/installing their version manually

    “Trust is essential”. Spot on. Does anyone at WordPress even think about how dodgy this whole thing looks. If you knew nothing about all this mess, you could think the plugin had been hacked. This is not how you foster a safer internet.

    Essentially force pushing code to 2M+ websites, hmm, I can’t see what would be dodgy about that at all???

    Frankly, I don’t use WP anymore and haven’t for years but re-created my account here just to post the force pushing of code is crazy. The risk factor that this highlights is off the charts. Other CMS solutions use standard deployment practices like composer with staging and production environments, there is no possibility of a force push due to someone’s opinion and ego.

    @exotwirl Genuinely curious how SCF does not meet your needs vs ACF? What functionality difference(s) have you run into and how has your site(s) been affected?

    You are missing the entire point, and if you can’t see the point then you are not in the corporate world. This has introduced an unbelievable amount of risk now for every corporation using WP as their CMS. Lots of companies will now have their eyes opened that at any point suddenly WP can fork and push plugins to their site that have the potential to bring broken and untested code.

    Furthermore, they are already versions behind ACF, and I would imagine ACF will be working hard to ensure that they are patching and fixing things quicker than SCF can implement them.

    Corporate sector should be moving away from this CMS with haste.

    @joshgreenuk while I totally agree that the whole ACF move was awful and they should have released a different forked plugin and leave this one as is, your comments about the technical parts don’t make sense, you can’t seriously say you don’t trust the core developers of the whole wordpress codebase and woocommerce to develop this plugin to the highest standard and not push broken code, managing custom meta should have always been done by the core devs as they are the best qualified to make the right decisions and i have no doubt they will BUT as already said in the beginning this is not a technical discussion about code or skills, this take-over of the acf profile in the wp repo should have never happened, it is wrong on so many levels and it did so much damage to WP image and trust without binging any benefit to anyone involved at all.

    I don’t use WP because of many reasons, security and opinion based decisions being a massive factor. I use CMS systems which you have to update locally, run tests, push to staging, run tests and then push to production with zero downtime deployment.

    They make perfect sense, you just trust the ego-focused maniac that decided he wanted to throw his toys out the pram too much. Everyone is now forced to use a fork of something where if something is patched they have additional time now to wait for stolen custom fields to merge upstream in.

    WordPress is optimised very poorly at its core. Large sites with a million rows in the tables really struggle, this is where other much more professional CMS’s come in to play that the corporate sector widely use.

    The only benefit he is bringing is that every wild action that happens here at the minute is just marketing for me to show my clients why to migrate away from WP or why my proposal is better than the competitors.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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