Reply To: ACF Date picker + Woo + WP All Export

• John Huebner

• October 11, 2020 at 12:51 am

The reason that they are stored this way today is backwards compatibility. It’s not possible to switch to standard date formats without breaking every site already using date fields. I think the developer attempted to make this changes when the date/time field was introduced an this is exactly what happened. This goes back to the first version of ACF, I don’t know why this format was chosen at the time.

If you need to have the date fields in the right format to allow searching and sorting them as “dates” what you can do is to create another custom field in WP the normal way using add_post_meta() or update_post_meta(). When a post is saved create an acf/save_post filter that gets the value from the acf date field, converts it to a proper date and then saves the value in the new field. Then you can use this other field instead of the ACF field for whatever you need.