
I don’t want the validation to be in the User area. I only want the front end to have the validation. I did a condition which will return if it is the admin page by using is_admin(). I’ve also tried wrapping the following code inside function in a !(is_admin). What happens is when the page is posted it goes to a page with the /?updated=true and displays the error message. It is not like before where you get a red box above the input field that says the error. So basically I want the validation to only happen on the front end. Admins can edit users in the backend without any problems. Please help I’m so close.
function my_acf_validate_value( $valid, $value, $field, $input ) {
if( is_admin() ) {
return $valid;
}
$current_id = get_current_user_id();
$wp_user_id = 'user_' . $current_id;
$current_email = get_the_author_meta('user_email', $current_id);
if($value == "" || $value == " ") {
$valid = "Email field cannot be empty";
} elseif( email_exists($value) && $value != $current_email ) {
$valid = "This email already exists. Use a unique email";
}
return $valid;
}

Looking at another thread I saw ended up doing this:
function my_acf_validate_value( $valid, $value, $field, $input ) {
$current_id = get_current_user_id();
$wp_user_id = 'user_' . $current_id;
$current_email = get_the_author_meta('user_email', $current_id);
if( $_POST['acf']['register'] == 'true' ) {
if($value == "" || $value == " ") {
$valid = "Email field cannot be empty";
} elseif( email_exists($value) && $value != $current_email ) {
$valid = "This email already exists. Use a unique email";
}
}
return $valid;
}
and I added a hidden field called ‘register’ to ‘html_after_fields’ to the form which the above checked. See what I did here:
function zUpdate( $atts, $content = null ) {
$current_id = get_current_user_id();
$user_id = 'user_' . $current_id;
$options = array(
'post_id' => $user_id,
/* my field group grabs unit, home phone, and cell phone acf */
'field_groups' => array('3307', ),
'submit_value' => 'Update',
'html_after_fields' => '<input type="hidden" name="acf[register]" value="true"/>',
);
$form = acf_form( $options );
return $form;
}