Reply To: Is using ACF repeater to develop chat system good?

• John Huebner

• February 10, 2018 at 1:29 am

I’m with @nathanaelphilip on this one. Rolling your own chat system is probably not the way I’d go. There are already plugins for integrating chat into WP, like this one https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-live-chat-support/

As far as cons for using ACF repeater fields, or ACF at all…

ACF is a great plugin but it has it’s limitations. Performance of ACF on a high traffic site where you’d need to store thousands of messages in the meta table would likely (eventually) crash the entire thing. You have to remember that ACF uses WP core built in meta table and meta functions for data storage and retrieval and it is the core functionality of WP meta that actually creates the limitations of ACF. ACF is tool for creating admin pages that are easy to use.

Think about what you would need to do in WP if you didn’t have ACF just using update_post_meta() and get_post_meta(). Not to mention that every chat string would need to have it’s own “Post” with related information about who is allowed to access it. What would hundreds of thousands of posts do to WP?

There is also the problem you mentioned of two or more people trying to update the same information at exactly the same time. I’d assume that this would be rare, but if you tried to perform to updates to the database at the same time, to be honest, I don’t know what the results would be. You could either loose a message or end up with DB errors that crash one side of the conversation.

This site does not even use ACF for this forum. It uses BBPress with some modifications done using ACF.