Reply To: WP_Query – sort by custom field and publish date

• John Huebner

• April 2, 2023 at 11:09 am

You can’t work out how to do this because there is no way to do what you are attempting to do.

WP does not have a way to sort by 2 different values depending on which one exists. You would need to make the display date required or you would need to dynamically populate that field with the post date if no value is entered. Use an acf/save_post filter get the post date and update the field

update_field('date_field', get_the_date('Ymd', $post_id), $post_id);