ACF 6.6: Gutenberg Blocks v3, Better Editing, and a Touch of Colour Control

If you’ve ever built custom blocks with ACF, you’ll know that up until now the editing experience has felt a little… separate. Everything happened inside an iframe, meaning your block’s editor view was basically a mini version of your site theme. Functional, yes — but not exactly seamless.

That’s all changed in ACF 6.6. The iframe is gone. Instead, block editing now happens directly in the WordPress editor, right alongside core and third-party blocks. It feels more natural, quicker, and better aligned with how Gutenberg actually works.

And honestly, hats off to the ACF team — removing that iframe can’t have been easy. I’ve felt that pain myself when trying to bridge the gap between custom fields and block rendering, so seeing it solved in such a clean way is very welcome.

ACF Blocks v3: A smoother block-building experience

Under the hood, there are new ways to register blocks, and the API feels a bit more refined. The change might look small, but it’s a big step towards making ACF blocks feel like first-class Gutenberg citizens. Developers can finally focus on design and field logic rather than fighting the editor context.

A splash of colour

ACF 6.6 also adds a new colour palette control, which lets you define colour options for your fields and blocks. It’s a neat addition, though in practice I usually end up building my own colour fields that offer a restricted palette.

Why? Because giving content editors a full colour wheel is a recipe for chaos. Instead, I prefer limiting options to on-brand colours — it keeps consistency across the site and lets us control colours globally in CSS. That means if a client ever updates their brand palette (rare, but it happens), we can make the change once in the stylesheet rather than across hundreds of content blocks.

That said, I love that the new palette tool is opt-in. It’s nice to see ACF respecting existing setups and letting developers decide when to jump in. I’ll definitely be testing it out to see how it fits into the workflow — and whether it might finally replace my custom approach.

Small changes, big improvements

There’s a lot to like about ACF 6.6. It’s not a flashy release, but it tightens up the everyday experience of using blocks in a way that makes development smoother and editing more intuitive. For anyone who builds sites that bridge the gap between code and content — which is pretty much every Jambi project — this update feels like a thoughtful step forward.