Greetings! I’ve been experimenting with acf_form() lately and I would like to build a project based on it (as it would allow users to work/post/edit outside of wp-admin, using a custom/minimal ui). It’s an awesome feature, yet I’ve realized something: if one or more users are working on the same post on the frontend, there’s no “post locking” whatsoever (https://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Locking), at least as far I can see. Needless to say, the lack of it may lead to data being lost/overwritten by users interacting on the same post.
So I’m left wondering if this is a feature that may be included in the future and/or if someone already found himself in this situation and managed a way around it.
This is something I have not seen come up before, but probably a good question. Because ACF will not know how a particular site needs to work I don’t think you see it added. But this is something you can manage yourself. Before calling ACF form test to see if the post is locked https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_check_post_lock, if it is then do not call acf_form() and show your own message about the post being locked. You can also lock https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_set_post_lock and unlock the page. I’m sure there’s more to it.
But no this is not something that ACF does and I cannot recall it coming as a topic here before. You might want to submit the feature request in a new ticket https://support.advancedcustomfields.com/new-ticket/
Using wp_check_post_lock() would allow me to gain a lot of flexibily, I really like to sound of it – unfortunately I may be failing at understanding how to properly use it: I get a “Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function wp_check_post_lock()” both on the front/backend. Could you point me in the right direction perhaps (I understand this is more of a WordPress request at this point, but if you have a few minutes to spare I would appreciate it a lot!).
Meanwhile I’m gonna open up a ticket as you suggested.
Thanks in advance!
I was just reading the documentation before. I checked the code and wp_check_post_lock is a function, so I don’t know why the error. To be honest, the documentation on the whole post locking thing is not very clear. For example, there’s nothing that I can find to unlock a post, only to lock it. The poor documentation on the subject may be the reason that it’s not something ACF is doing.
Scott Clark has posted a potential solution for this that also applies to Pods and Gravity Forms: https://github.com/sc0ttkclark/wp-post-locking
