Can someone tells me what more CMB2 offers compared to ACF plugin?

This is an excellent question that I’m not sure we’re the MOST qualified to answer, but I will say that ACF Pro is an incredible plugin, especially considering that it is maintained/supported through the premium model. Everything we do w/ CMB2 is free and community supported and developed.

As with almost all comparisons, it really comes down to the things you are needing out of your tools, and what works best for you.

A few key differences:

• CMB2 is free as well as all addons/extensions that I know of.
• ACF has a UI for adding boxes/fields, CMB2 does not (it has a robust developer API for registering those things — think of things like register_post_type()).
• CMB2 can be bundled as a library with any other plugin or theme and it will just work. A lot of work went into the loader aspect of CMB2 to make sure that only one version of the library will load, and always the most current versions.

A few notes re: CMB2

• Community support, no paid support option
• Extensive documentation and examples (also see the snippet library)
• Strong commitment and track record with maintaining backwards-compatibility.

Hopefully that helps a bit. Feel free to ask any additional questions you may have. Bottom line: both are great projects, but with different philosophies and sustaining models

Thank you for your answer. Greetly appreciated.

Hmmm, I’m coming back to you for a question : does CMB2 offers something to put custom fields in custom tables?

My project isn’t finished yet, but I have already to deal with a dozen of CPT, 5 taxonomies for each, 5 meta fields… and then thinking about the future of this project by not being bottlenecked by queries is mandatory. (in a near future, each article will have at least a query containing a minimum of 10 related products, queried by taxonomy/meta or relationship field).

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by moxymore.

Nothing officially, but there are hooks during the fetching/saving process that can be used to intercept data being processed, and you could do whatever you want with it at that time.

As a quick example, I’ve set up a plugin that utilizes CMB2 to have both a metabox and an options page option that both save to the same option. If I recall right, the wp_option is where we want the info saved to, so we bypass the postmeta table in that example.

If going the route of custom tables, might want to check out this repo: https://github.com/rubengc/CT

I have an example of working with custom tables…it is working GREAT!

https://gist.github.com/dskurth/d56744de4ae076c417f59b2a459eaf4b