acf-field disappears from admin (both post edit and acf fields edit)

• paul

• February 28, 2017 at 8:02 am

ok. I have exhausted every single option for this issue and only found a temporary fix. Thats why i am coming here.

basically i have a property site (rentals and sales) and i use acf to create the different parameters for each property (works really well).

price ranges, prices, types of property, photographs, area etc etc

one of those fields is called Property area and is a select field with the different area locations.

recently i was asked to add an area in the select drop down which renders in the search form as well as the property pages. When i added this location (alphabetical) the field disappeared both from the post edit screen and the acf custom field groups and fields edit area.

i found that whenever i saved the field, it would set the post_parent of the acf-field to 0 in the database, meaning that it was not associated with any acf-group.

My solution was to edit the acf-field parent back to its original value physically in the sql db (post_parent = 11711) and it would work. But every time i update this list, the same happens and post parent is set to 0 and the field vanishes.

Has anyone ever seen this before.

im running acf PRO 5.5.3 and im afraid to update as there are thousands of properties in the db.

• paul

• February 28, 2017 at 8:14 am

just to confirm another suspicion, its happening on every acf-field in this group.

i have to manually edit the sql field and set its post_parent back to the acf group it should be with.

• John Huebner

• March 3, 2017 at 6:06 am

I’ve seen a similar question before… but i can’t find it. If I recall correctly the problem was a filter that was causing the issue.

Have you tried disabling plugins and changing themes? You’re going to have to narrow down where to look for the problem.

• paul

• March 3, 2017 at 6:56 am

its what im afraid of.

my only issue is that basically acf is used in combination with wpml, so that is one plugin i cannot disable and i hope this is not the problem.

my plan of action now is to duplicate the whole site to a dev environment, scale back plugins that are non essential or not involved in anything at the core of the site admin, see what else i can remove, then hope for the best that i find the culprit and i can resolve the issue.

The last resort is that if i ever change any ACF field value by editing the field, i always have to make sure to track if it disappears, and if it does i go into sql and reset the parent value.

Strange thing was, it only started happening recently and i cannot for the life of me remember which plugins i updated and when.

If you ever find the post/problem John, let me know, you would be saving me a lot of effort to check it and see if there is an immediate fix.

• John Huebner

• March 3, 2017 at 7:04 am

The plan is good, I had to do the same thing recently to find a problem on an extremely complicate site.

The thing is that I’m sure that I posted a reply to the topic, but I post a couple hundred replies here a month and I have a long memory. I’m sure that it was recently, but that could mean in the last 6 months. I just remember that there was a similar question because it was unique… well, not unique now 🙂