There’s no way to disable ACF bundled with Intense, looks like it’s a ‘hard’ dependency.
Still, even when I disabled Intense (and thus its bundled ACF) – the database update never completed, meaning, it kept asking for update again and again. There was no way for the bundled ACF to load before the stand alone one because I even tried moving the Intense dir out of plugins and this didn’t change anything.
From the looks of it, the DB update process tried to query all existing taxonomies and terms, and considering the fact that I have 300k+ of those – it simply failed at some point.
Generally speaking, there was nothing to update, I used Intense to add a single shortcode somewhere in the theme and I highly doubt this shortcode (masonry, https://intenseplugin.com/shortcodes/masonry-shortcode/) actually utilizes the bundled ACF in any way.
I’ll review your DB update process when I have some spare time, but my wild guess is that if ACF notices a sign of a previous version (e.g. in wp_options) – it’ll attempt to update the DB and it’ll start from querying all available taxonomies and terms. I realize my case is rare, not many of us here keep 300k taxonomy terms, lol.
However, I did contact Intense guys, they also said this looks weird, partially, because they believe Intense does detect the stand alone ACF and doesn’t load the bundled one if it’s not needed.
Ok, we’ll see where all this takes us 🙂
