Reply To: Convert Regular Custom Fields To Advanced Custom Fields?

• John Huebner

• January 10, 2018 at 7:44 am

Sorry for the late reply, this is a very old topic.

There isn’t any way to retroactively do this.

All I can say is this. If the fields are basic fields that store only text data then creating a field group and fields with the same names will make everything work. ACF will automatically pick up these fields.

If the field data is stored some other way, examples

• Serialized Data (arrays and the like)
• Standard WP meta fields that have more than one value
• ID references to other WP objects
• there could be others

then this information cannot be converted without a lot of effort. You’d need to create some kind of a cron that would read through every post and read every one of the existing fields and then update the database and all fields to what ACF needs in the database. To be honest, doing this is not realistic.

Another alternative might be to use WP All Export Pro and WP All Import Pro. It might be possible to export the content to an XML file of spreadsheet and then import and rearrange the data. This is probably the path I would try. http://www.wpallimport.com/