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January 3, 2024
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Video: Using the repeater field
Advanced Custom Fields ships with a few very powerful fields, one of which is called the “repeater” field. This is, in our view, a bit of misnomer in that the repeater ‘field’ is more of a container of sub-fields that you specify, all of which can be repeated as many times as you want. This video is intended to help you get a handle on this field as well as introduce examples of how it could be used.
Like all custom fields, the repeater field is “map-able” into the page builder, so it supports dynamic content. This is particularly useful as it allows you to leverage the template functionality (i.e., build one layout that applies to many pages/posts) but gives your the freedom to have a varying amount of content based on how many times you use the ‘repeater’ field on each page or post.
A good example of this, which is described in a tutorial in the video library, is using the repeater field to create sections on a blog post. Imagine that each section has a 1) headline, 2) body text and 3) an image. With the repeater field, you could have one blog post that has 3 of these sections and a second blog post that has 10 of these sections.
In this example, both blog posts would benefit from the same template (i.e., you don’t need to design them both individually, saving you time), but would display a different number of sections based on the content in the repeater fields.
The ACF repeater field can feel complex, however it’s actually quite intuitive. Still, you need to walk through it a few times to understand how it works and consider how it could be used. It’s a powerful way to organize and display data, and, combined with the page builder’s template functionality, can greatly aid in keeping your design and maintenance costs down to a minimum.