Rolle Laukkarinen
Rolle has developed for WordPress since 2005 and has worked with code for about thirty years. He is the founder and CTO of Digitoimisto Dude Oy, where he works as both a developer and a system administrator. He maintains the open source WordPress starter theme air-light, which has over 1100 stars on GitHub. He has published something online every day since 1999. His main interests are accessibility, open source, Linux servers, programming, building his own tools and automation, and keeping the internet open and ethical as a last stand against enshittification. He is the guy who still insists on configuring his IRC client exactly the way he wants it.
Session
Going ACF-free: replacing a plugin dependency with core WordPress
Sisu Talk
14:10 – 14:55
Complexity: Hard
Intended Audience: Theme developers and agencies maintaining ACF-dependent WordPress sites
Advanced Custom Fields has been a default in WordPress work for over a decade, to the point where a lot of sites cannot be maintained without it. Core has caught up considerably since then, particularly in how native Gutenberg blocks handle custom data and how blocks can be registered. Rolle goes through what core offers in place of the features developers lean on most, what changes in how you build once the plugin is gone, and where ACF is still the more sensible choice.