NPC Manual Generator for Advanced Custom Fields

When you hand off a WordPress site to a client, they often ask “where do I edit what?”. NPC Manual Generator for Advanced Custom Fields parses the field structures defined by Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) and produces an update manual that operations staff can actually read – in Markdown and PDF.

Designed for real-world handoff use, the plugin renders Repeater / Flexible Content / Group nesting, translates ACF location rules into readable text, and bundles a Japanese-capable font for PDF output, so the result is something you can ship as a deliverable.

Main features

• Read ACF local JSON (acf-json/group_xxx.json) and field groups stored in the database
• Indented rendering for nested fields (Repeater / Flexible Content / Group)
• Formatted output of field type, required flag, instructions, choices, and more
• Location rule humanization (post type, taxonomy, page templates; resolves page/post titles when reading from the database)
• Live preview in the admin screen
• Markdown download (single file and Zip bundle)
• PDF download (single file – A4 portrait, IPAex Gothic bundled, header / footer / page numbers)
• Bulk Zip download with format selection (MD / PDF / Both)
• Paired filename rename when bundling so that the MD and PDF for the same group share the same suffix

Translation

All UI strings are wrapped with __() / _e() and the text domain npc-manual-generator-for-advanced-custom-fields. A Japanese translation is bundled (languages/npc-manual-generator-for-advanced-custom-fields-ja.po). Additional languages can be contributed through translate.wordpress.org.

Roadmap

• Template feature (rebrand the manual with your studio’s logo and colors)
• Inline display in the post editor sidebar
• Sample value capture (pull one real post and show “currently entered as …”)
• Diff manuals (highlight changes since the previous output)
• Automatic screenshot insertion (capture the admin screen with a headless browser and embed in the PDF)

Links

• Official site: https://n-pc.jp/
• Developer blog: https://n-pc.jp/blog/

Author

npc – Freelance WordPress developer working with ACF since 2016. This plugin grew from in-house tools used to ship real client projects.

Third-party Licenses

This plugin bundles the following third-party software.

• mPDF (mpdf/mpdf 8.x): GPL-2.0-only. See vendor/mpdf/mpdf/LICENSE.txt.
• IPAex Gothic Font (fonts/ipaexg.ttf): IPA Font License Agreement v1.0. See fonts/IPA_Font_License_Agreement_v1.0.txt. Official: https://moji.or.jp/ipafont/license/

The mPDF dependencies are also bundled (all under compatible licenses):

• setasign/fpdi – MIT
• psr/log – MIT
• psr/http-message – MIT
• paragonie/random_compat – MIT
• myclabs/deep-copy – MIT
• mpdf/psr-log-aware-trait – GPL-2.0-only
• mpdf/psr-http-message-shim – GPL-2.0-only