Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) Options Page and Polylang

We’ve been working recently on a multilingual site for Sonoma County Adult Education and it is important that they have full support for both English and Spanish. Since we’re using WordPress to build the site we opted to use the WordPress plugin Polylang. Polylang has been very simple to setup and configure even with our multiple taxonomies and custom post types and even with Advanced Custom Fields (ACF).

When we build sites we use Advanced Custom Fields often to build out a more custom backend for the content manager and cater it to the client’s needs. This includes usually a “Site Options” page that has various fields (images, text, WYSIWYG, etc) that allow the client to manage more global content. But unlike posts, pages, taxonomies, etc there was no out of the box support for multiple Site Options based on languages. In other words, there was just one single Site Options page and we needed two versions — English and Spanish.

We found a nifty little solution on the ACF forums to integrate ACF Options Page and Polylang, you can see the full post here. But the crux of it is to register multiple ACF Option Pages based off the languages you are supporting with Polylang.

Register ACF Options with Polylang Support

In your functions.php file add the following.

if( function_exists('acf_add_options_page') ) {

  // Language Specific Options
  // Translatable options specific languages. e.g., social profiles links
  // 
  
  $languages = array( 'en', 'es' );

  foreach ( $languages as $lang ) {
    acf_add_options_page( array(
      'page_title' => 'Site Options (' . strtoupper( $lang ) . ')',
      'menu_title' => __('Site Options (' . strtoupper( $lang ) . ')', 'text-domain'),
      'menu_slug'  => "site-options-${lang}",
      'post_id'    => $lang
    ) );
  }

}

What are we doing above? Essentially we are registering an ACF Options Page for each language. Where it reads  $languages = array( 'en', 'es' ); replace en and es with your languages or add additional languages. Change Site Options text to whatever you want your Options page to be named.

Add the_field() to Your Templates

Usually when using the ACF Options page to include the field you would write,the_field('YOUR_FIELD','option'); but instead, we are going to replace ‘option’ with ‘pll_current_language(‘slug’).’ So your final code for including a field would look like  the_field('YOUR_FIELD',pll_current_language('slug')); .

Final Code

the_field('YOUR_FIELD',pll_current_language('slug'));

This works for repeater fields, logic, and pretty much anything you can do normally with ACF when including in the template.

Hopefully, this saves someone some trouble. If you have any questions leave them in the comments.