Alternatives for ACF / Elementor to Create Post with Specific Fields?

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Hey All – apologies in advance if this is a rookie question or if I’m not super clear in my explanations; I kind of went from zero to throwing myself head first into creating my first site and I’m kind of just doggy paddling to the finish line slowly, so I’m not fully grasping it all just yet.

The site I’m creating is essentially a directory site. Basically I’m capturing a title / name of an event, a company / sponsor, description box, a category, a type of event, contact name, external page for more information, start and end dates, etc. I attached a quick example I made that’s the general jist of it; nothing complicated beyond dates and a URL. To accomplish that, I used ACF to set up a field group, then a custom post type. Then ultimately used Elementor to create the custom post template.

I’ve got no issues with Elementor, it’s lovely. But I’m essentially only using it because I needed to build a post template that would populate the custom fields, and all roads led me there. I used a free, non-Elementor theme, my tables of the listings are created via shortcode through Post Tables Pro and are posted to pages that the fanciest element is a border. Since I’m using the custom post type, I’m not even using Elementor to create my posts. So I’m not sure if I’m really getting enough out of that $99 annual fee and not sure there’s much more I’d be adding that would.

After I set things up that way, I did find that I could have used an additional plugin, ACF Views / Advanced Views Framework that works with ACF to create shortcode I could use to populat the page that way. But that required a bit more CSS building within the plugin to make it look decent, and I couldn’t manage to make certain fields look decent no matter how hard I tried. I also tried to use a process where I could enter via Jotform, then integrate with Zapier to map the entries to a post, but I couldn’t seem to map to custom fields (didn’t check to see if I could have mapped to ACF ones) and didn’t want to start paying for random upgrades to try.

So, are there any other possible solutions that wouldn’t involve Elementor for accomplishing this? Some way to just have the custom fields that can be created in the standard editor (vs. ACF) displayed each time an entry is created vs. having to select the fields each time? Or ideally to somehow use a form to make the entries and have it automatically map to those fields? Heck, I’d even settle for a Google Sheet or an Excel sheet. I do need to keep it in some form of field form, just because of the way I’m displaying it in tables / filtering / etc. (and so I remember to include all the elements). I know if I could cut out ACF, that there’s a few block editors that can handle non-ACF dynamic fields, but not even sure those would handle the built-in custom fields. I feel like I’m making this more complicated than I need to and I’m missing something that’s probably much easier, but figured that I’d turn to those who know in hopes that maybe they could point out even a breadcrumb I could research for a solution (I’m good at trying and failing; just not sure what to even research to find a possible solution), so I appreciate any help that can be offered!

https://preview.redd.it/1rvugczm2y8d1.png?width=1588&format=png&auto=webp&s=6f9145634b77a597362d370b075b22436b941ede

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