Reply To: Options sub-page overwriting field values on other option sub-pages

• John Huebner

• September 4, 2016 at 3:47 am

Options page values are stored in the _options table, there is only one place to save them in this case and creating two fields with the same name means they have the same option_name. ACF does not have any way to determine that a field belongs to a specific options page, either when saving it or when calling one of the front end functions with ‘options’ as the ID. Contrary to what a lot of people think, ACF does not actually track what field value belongs where, it simply save values to the database and then retrieves them when you supply the right information. The “Location Rules” have no effect on the fields, they just tell ACF that a group should be displayed. Saving values to an options page is like a “default”, if ACF can’t figure out where a value should be saved it ends up there. ACF basically works as a big wrapper for existing functions in WP. ACF has always worked this way and there is very little chance that this will change in the future.

If you want to submit this as a bug you should open a new ticket https://support.advancedcustomfields.com/new-ticket/, but I suspect you will get a response similar, but maybe a little less verbose, as the one I just gave.

There are choices. I’ve already mentioned a couple of them.

Another option, if you’re using ACF 5 (Pro), is to specify a post_id to save the options to when creating the options page https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/acf_add_options_page/.

Another option is to customize the field group based on the options page that’s being loaded to add your own prefixes or suffixes to all the field names and then use these modified field names when getting the values in templates. This option would require a lot more explanation than is possible on this forum, but if you investigate this I suspect you’ll learn a lot more about why ACF works the way it works.