***This plugin requires Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) Version >= 5.5.0 This plugin will not provide any functionality if ACF 5 is not installed and active.

This plugin adds a field setting to all field types that allows for the selection of WP User Roles that should be allowed to manage the value of the field. Fields that the current user does not have permission to edit are removed from the field group when it's fields are loaded.

Caution: It is possible to set a field so that it can never be edited by anyone. This can be done in several ways. The first example is easy, simply do not select any user role that can edit the field. The second example is less obvious. If you have a field that appears on "Posts" and you set this field so that only "Subscribers" can edit the field, since subscribers cannot by default edit a post in the admin, then you have effectively made this field uneditable. However, allowing only subscribers to edit a field could be useful on a front end form where you want extra field for subscribers that are not available to visitors that are not logged in.

The Tab and Clone fields have been excluded from having the user role setting added to them.

Most of the time it would not make sense for a tab field, unless all of the fields in the tab were set the same, in other words, removing a tab should remove all the fields in that tab. That's not something that I can do. You would need to enable the tab field and set the user role for the tab and all fields that should appear in the tab.

I'm not sure about the clone field, I haven't worked with it much. You can test it out if you want and let me know what happens.

There is a filter so that you can adjust the types of fields that are excluded

add_filter('acf/user_role_setting/exclude_field_types', 'user_role_setting_excluded_field_types');
function user_role_setting_excluded_field_types($exclude) {
  /* 
    $exclude holds an array of field types to exclude from adding user role settings
    default value:
    $exclude = array('tab' => 'tab', 'clone' => 'clone');
  */
	
	// remove tab field from exclude
  if (isset($exclude['tab'])) {
    unset($exclude['tab']);
  }
	
	// add message field to exclude
	$exclude['message'] = 'message';
	
  return $exclude;
}