Automattic Receives Backlash For Cloning Premium Plugin [Video]

Automattic cloned WP Engine’s paid ACF Premium plugin and is distributing it for free. Many in the WordPress community disapprove of this action, expressing concerns that it undermines the plugin and theme ecosystem.

Advanced Custom Fields Plugin

Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) is a WordPress plugin that’s popular with WordPress website developers because it enables them to create custom fields that WordPress publishers and authors can use.

Custom fields allows developers to take full control of the editing screens to add things like a form for building structured data specific for a kind of WordPress page like Schema.org markup for ecommerce, news, legal or medical context. A custom field can be used to give article authors a place to enter the author name or a featured quote.

Website developers and use ACF to enable authors to add author bios, featured quotes, or article metadata like publication date, modification data or links to sources. For example, …