For anyone who might be stuck on a similar problem, after a lot of searching, and trial-erroring, I came up with a bodged solution that deals with this, which uses $wpdb, so there’s no hardcoding a specific meta_key. Originally I bound this to ACF being active, but realised it can work for any post meta.
global $post;
// using $wpdb, grab all post_meta for the current post_id
// then ignore all meta_keys beginning with an underscore
// then search the all remaining ones for the shortcode
// if the post's meta_values has the shortcode anywhere, do stuff
global $wpdb;
$post_id = $post->ID;
$post_meta_sql = "select * from $wpdb->postmeta where post_id = {$post_id} and meta_key not like '\_%' and meta_value like '%[shortcode]%'";
$post_meta_results = $wpdb->get_results( $post_meta_sql );
// run the has_shortcode() as usual, works for all the_content() cases
if ( is_a( $post, 'WP_Post' ) && has_shortcode( $post->post_content, 'shortcode' ) ) {
// do stuff
return required_shortcode_js();
}
// for shortcodes in post_meta
else if ( is_a( $post, 'WP_Post' ) && ! empty( $post_meta_results ) ) {
// do stuff
return required_shortcode_js();
}
No idea what sort of performance hit doing this might cause, and can think of a number of cases where it could fail. There is a Core ticket open for this issue here: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/36958, which might be another way of doing it.
