Reply To: Different storage type

• aegon

• April 20, 2020 at 6:32 am

Hi John,

Thank you for your response. I appreciate it. I’ve seen you being very active on the forums. Actually much more active than the developer himself.

1. I understand the reason for the second meta field. I know ACF stores that specific extra little information there. I’m just curious why this approach was taken instead of some sort of a pure PHP registry that would store this information and would not require this database bloat. I’d love to get some insight from the developer here. I’m not saying this is bad, I’m just trying to learn and understand the reasoning behind it. There is no information about it in the docs.

2. Yeah, I’m aware of that but if we go this way, we can say the same about the Repeater field: why not store the entire “Repeater” field as a serialized meta? It would just be a single meta field update operation. Instead of that, if you have a Repeater field consisting of 10 fields and you create 20 entries with it, you end up with 200 meta fields to update. And that’s only one repeater field. Imagine you have 5 of those. Yeah, you end up with 1000 meta fields per single post.

I’m trying to understand why such a “separate fields” approach was taken for the repeater but not for the other fields? I wouldn’t be asking if either one or the other was used for every case, consistently – but it’s not the case. I’m really curious about it as I want to learn the concept so I can use the plugin with full confidence for my clients.

And thank you for posting the snippet: I’m perfectly fine writing my own code but I truly want to use the plugin for meta box management as it is, without a need to do any sort of hacking for such core functionality as the data storage type.

If there is good reasoning for all of the above, I’d LOVE to learn and get to know it. Whether it’s about the backward compatibility or something else, it would be good to know.

Thank you so much.

PS. I’m a little worried about the recent activity of the plugin developer. Based on Elliot’s profile, I can see the forum replies count varies between 1-2 per month. I understand the support is being taken care by the support ticket system but I have posted there regarding a different issue and haven’t got any response for 4 days now. I’m a bit worried about the state of this matter?