ACF Pro v5.5.4 Creating Duplicate Posts/Pages

• Precision Creations

• January 19, 2017 at 5:27 am

We just updated all of our sites to ACF Pro v5.5.4 (WP 4.7.1).

However, whenever you create a new post or page and either save it as a draft or publish it, it creates another post just like it.

In fact, every time you hit ‘Save Draft’ or ‘Update’ it creates a new post or page. So if you make multiple changes to a post or page, you might have 5 or 6 copies of the same post (different IDs).

We rolled the sites back to ACF Pro v5.5.3 and the issue went away. We haven’t debugged things to see if it’s an issue with the plugin, or an issue with our themes and the plugin—but I wanted to make everyone is aware of the issue ASAP.

I would recommend testing the update before you roll it out to your live sites.

Thanks!

• lcg_1111

• January 19, 2017 at 6:43 am

I am experiencing this too on ALL sites using ACF. Need a solution, and fast!

• Precision Creations

• January 19, 2017 at 6:49 am

@lcg_1111, if you roll it back to v5.5.3, it should work until the latest version is fixed. You can download older versions in your account (hit ‘See all versions’). https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/my-account/

• lcg_1111

• January 19, 2017 at 7:32 am

I am doing so. Unfortunately, I have to do this to many sites. Ugh.

• lcg_1111

• January 19, 2017 at 7:37 am

ACF needs to turn off the “There’s a new version” so more people don’t install v 5.5.4

• jimmy.smutek

• January 19, 2017 at 10:38 am

Confirming the same issue here, but in my case it only appears to be happening if I’m using an image field.

The post will be duplicated if I do the following –

– create a new field group,
– add an image field,
– set visibility to (for example) show if post type is post
– create or open an existing post, click update

If I then edit the field group and change the field type from image to text, the problem goes away. At this point updating a post will not create a duplicate.

Changing the field type back to image will bring back the problem.

This was tested on a fresh install of 4.7.1 using ACF 5.5.4, default 2017 theme, and no other plugins activated.

I noticed the issue on a work in progress and from that can confirm that the issue persists when changing visibility conditions (change show if post to show if page, or show if post is “foo”, etc.).

The problem did not seem to affect image fields nested inside of repeaters.

Also, the duplicated posts are created and saved as child pages of the original post.

Some Post
— Some Post

In my tests updating a child page would not create a duplicate, only updating the parent would cause another duplicate.

Hope this is helpful.

https://smutek.net/app/uploads/2017/01/bug.mov

• Precision Creations

• January 19, 2017 at 11:13 am

The ACF team just released v5.5.5 and this problem is now solved. Looks like the issue was related to creating an empty post for each file/image field when no attachment was selected.

Thanks for fixing this one so quickly guys!

• pjverrone

• March 1, 2018 at 1:53 am

Using version 5.6.9 and this is still VERY MUCH a problem.

• Beee

• March 2, 2018 at 4:43 am

I’m not experiencing this on 5.6.9