Check if function exists when pulling 3rd party plugins into ACF core! Please!

• squarecandy

• June 16, 2016 at 11:10 am

Hi ACF folks –

Spent a bunch of yesterday scrambling to fix all of my sites that previously used ACF date time picker.

Looks like you guys pulled this functionality into ACF Pro Core for this most recent update. Awesome! We love that.

However, it would be a good idea for future releases of this functionality, and also an excellent idea in the future for any other functionality, to check if class_exists or if function_exists when you pull an existing 3rd party plugin’s functionality into the plugin. That quick check would have kept all the sites running the 3rd party ACF date time picker plugin from going down upon updating to ACF 5.3.9.

I suppose that you could argue that the author of the 3rd party plugin should have known better and could have used something like class my_special_acf_field_date_time_picker instead of just class acf_field_date_time_picker… but I think ACF developers should know what 3rd party extension plugins are out there and try to avoid conflicts that break the entire wordpress site if possible.

Thanks for your consideration.

– P

• James

• June 16, 2016 at 11:32 am

Hi @squarecandy

The ACF date time picker plugin is not supposed to be used with the newest version of ACF as it has the similar feature. It’s the same as the premium add-ons that are not supposed to be used with the PRO version. So you should disable that add-on to get the date time picker field working correctly.

That being said, I guess the plugin author forgot to add a compatibility with the old add-on. Could you please open a new ticket so it can be passed directly to the plugin author? You can open it here: https://support.advancedcustomfields.com/new-ticket.

Thanks 🙂

• squarecandy

• June 16, 2016 at 2:04 pm

ok, will do.

• geetjacobs

• June 17, 2016 at 12:36 pm

I had the same issue, yes disabling the other plugin did fix it.

One sad thing is the other plugin had an option to save as timestamp, now all 642 events have the wrong date returned.

Writing a function to update every time entry now to format it like the new field you guys added.

• James

• June 17, 2016 at 1:37 pm

Hi @geetjacobs

I believe the plugin author has created a compatibility with the timestamp format. Please take a look at this thread to learn more about it: https://github.com/soderlind/acf-field-date-time-picker/issues/103.

Thanks 🙂

• geetjacobs

• June 17, 2016 at 1:45 pm

Thank you James.

I just re-downloaded the plugin and you are correct he did add timestamp format compatibility. Very nice. I am still going to write a function to update my old timestamps to the new format for consistency. I was using the format_value false for my event module to get the raw timestamp, new events are saving with the new format so seems wise for me to keep it all the same.

Cheers!

• squarecandy

• June 24, 2016 at 12:15 am

Thanks to everyone who helped solve the conflict with the 3rd party timepicker plugin. With the timestamp support everything is working pretty smoothly now.