I still have a few websites running fine with pretty recent versions of ACF and I wonder why they didn’t fail as my new projects despite my stupid habit of trying to keep the field names the same, thinking the information will be in a single place in the DB and will somehow be easier to access it no matter what field group I’m on.
I just remembered those websites have the fields defined in PHP from the exported code from ACF… and I made sure the keys matched for the fields I reused through the site (e.g. “subtitle” is meant to appear in different post types, but defined in two field groups: One for posts and the other for pages)
Would using the same key today -with the new version of acf pro- for different field definitions hurt in any way the system? I don’t care if the last one replaces the first one, as long as they all show up in all the groups I defined them.
It would not cause a problem if
- The fields are in different groups, repeater rows, flex rows (not siblings)
- The fields are identical in every way
But as soon as you have two identical fields that are siblings or you have one key representing a completely different type of field than another, then you would run into issues.