Hi Hugh – now I understand – thanks for the clarification!

No, I don’t think so. ACF works at the data layer of the app. You will always need something in the presentation layer to render that custom data.

When the suggestion is made to switch to a default theme and see what disappears, I think you should test this in the *admin backend*. If content types disappear, for instance, you’ve got things defined in your theme that probably shouldn’t be there.

PS can’t believe I got an email ping on this post; my comment above was 5 years ago 😉

Oh hang on I’ve just re-read the entire post.

One of your test cases for theme-creep is to switch the site to e.g. Twenty Seventeen theme and see if any content is missing.

If I do that on one of my sites, yes, a lot of content is missing.

Why? Because page templates within my theme are marked up to output Advanced Custom Fields. Unless the same markup is applied to templates within the WP 2018 theme the content will remain invisible.

How then is this NOT theme-creep?

(I’m hoping you can persuade me that it’s not!)

Thanks for your detailed reply – I am reassured 🙂

Hi both, thanks for the questions! Neither use you described is an example of theme creep.

ACF is a plugin that registers new types of post data. If you change themes, the data is still accessible: only the presentation of that data—how it outputs onto various types of page templates—has changed, and presentation is exactly what a theme should control. So registering new data through a plugin, and controlling the display of that data through a theme, is the correct way to use WordPress—it’s the opposite of theme creep.

Beaver Builder is a plugin for layout creation. It’s very “presentational,” so you can think of it as extending a theme’s job if you like. (A number of plugins have similarly presentational roles, such as Easy Google Fonts.) Plugins that do presentation do have a potential problem: they can lock you into using the plugin, or else all your layouts break. That “lock-in effect” can be a real problem, especially if your plugin is really bad, like WPBakery Builder. But it’s kind of the inverse problem of what we mean by theme creep: getting locked into a plugin because it controls your presentation, versus theme creep, which is getting locked into a theme because it controls your data.

The only additional thing I’d say about this is that WordPress is supposed to work if you change the theme and keep the plugins the same. The opposite (ditch the plugins, keep the theme, expect the site to keep working) is not true. So theme creep more directly contradicts what WordPress should be than does getting a site “hooked” on a very useful plugin like Beaver Builder, Easy Google Fonts, or for that matter WooCommerce.

Hope that helps!

I have exactly the same question about beaver-builder… is that creep?

If I follow your rules on theme creep would this mean no longer using this (or any similar) plugin ?