I’m working on a platform where users can create events for teachers and shool classes, teachers can enlist to those events and fill out feedback forms etc. For performance reasons I want to store these data in custom db tables. But it would be very comfortable to manage fields for the front end forms with ACF field groups.
Unfortunately I cannot find hints on how to use ACF to create/edit data other than “standard WordPress data” such as posts, users etc. Is ACF actually designed for this? I know I could process the post data with hooks such as “cf/save_post”, but that seems to be an ugly workaround and data validation would be a mess. Is there a more straightforward way?
acf frontend form itself has validation before its submitted. use acf/save_post filter to fire an additional action to save the data in your custom Database.
it would be stored in default custom fields also though..
i would do it something like:
setup database table ‘custom_events’ beforehand ofc
function insert_event(array $args = []) {
$defaults = [
'event_name' => null,
'time' => date('Y-m-d H:i:s'),
];
$values = wp_parse_args($args, $defaults);
if ( is_null($values['event_name']) ) {
return new \WP_Error("Please provide an event name");
}
global $wpdb;
$table_name = 'custom_events';
$table_name = $wpdb->prefix . $table_name;
$wpdb->insert($table_name, $values);
return $wpdb->insert_id;
}
add_action('yourprefix/events/insert', 'insert_event' );
function my_acf_save_post( $post_id ) {
// Get newly saved values.
$values = get_fields( $post_id );
// Make sure $values acf fields and your custom database fields match their names
do_action('yourprefix/events/insert', [ $values ]);
}
add_action('acf/save_post', 'my_acf_save_post');
you would need an update action aswell and also error handling its just the direction i would to it.
infact i do it same on some projects i maintain WP Post Data but additional data in custom tables
Thanks a lot laju. That’s about what I was thinking to enter or edit those data. But this approach enters a post and some postmeta on every form submit. I could delete the post after submission but this is quite nasty and iterates the post counter on every form submission. Is there a way to circumvent this?
hm i think ACF is in the middle between using WP posts and a bit of custom coding. If you want to do something complete custom i would not even use ACF for the form and validation of user input and build a little submission ajax/php form by yourself.
ACF is not designed to use custom DB tables.
There is a 3rd party plugin available for this, the free version is here https://wordpress.org/plugins/acf-to-custom-database-tables/, if you are using ACF Pro you’ll likely need the Pro version of that plugin.
