Reply To: Concern about ACF get_fields() efficiency…

• patch2112

• April 24, 2014 at 1:07 am

Another concept we’ve used actually is a bit of an internal caching system. Something like…

// Save People + Build cached json data
function my_save_people( $post_id ) {
	if ( get_post_type($post_id) == 'person') {
	
		// Get all and pack data
		$data = array();
		$args = array( 'post_type' => 'person', 'posts_per_page' => -1, 'post_status' => 'publish' );
		$the_query = new WP_Query( $args );
		if ( $the_query->have_posts() ) {
			while ( $the_query->have_posts() ) {
				$the_query->the_post();
				$array = get_fields(get_the_ID());
				$array['name'] = get_the_title();
				$array['permalink'] = get_the_permalink();
				$data[] = $array;
			}
		}
		wp_reset_postdata();	

		// Save to cache
		my_save_cache('people.json', $data);
	}
}
add_action('acf/save_post', 'my_save_people', 20);

// Save Cache
function my_save_cache($file, $data) {
	file_put_contents(SOME_PATH . '/cache/' . $file, json_encode($data));
}

// Get Cache item
function my_get_cache($file) {
	return json_decode(file_get_contents(SOME_PATH . '/cache/' . $file));
}

This puts most of the processing on the admin user when a ‘person’ is added/edited, then writes all the data to a text file which can then be pulled back in as a PHP array. No db hits at all this way for regular visitors.