Reply To: Performance issues on saving – repeater

• John Huebner

• January 29, 2018 at 2:01 am

Some other plugins might save all values as a single value in a serialized array.

This would make it impossible to query posts based on these meta values. For the most part, saving them as individual fields ACF avoids this issue with most field types. It would be impossible for ACF to have any type of functionality to replace this if everything was stored in one meta field and would require much more work on the part of developers to make a field searchable. If ACF switched to this model it would be a “Display Data” only instead of something that can be used to build applications. You can’t search and filter by values in “The Content” and one big field would have the same effect.

Also, it would be impossible to get any values if the plugin is deactivated. While it’s not highlighted in the documentation, it is possible to use built in WP function to get field values without formatted, building themes that will continue to work should ACF be deactivated. Most people do not do this and use acf function to get values, but I think this was a consideration.

From what I know, the developer’s goal is to extend WP in a way that uses and extends built in WP functions. ACF does not do anything that we could not do ourselves following the WP documentation and using standard WP functions, filters and actions.