Some posts hiccup with a different ACF structure

• OsakaWebbie

• December 1, 2014 at 7:02 pm

I have a CPT with various ACF fields, including taxonomy and file. You can see it in action at: http://oicjapan.org/message (Yeah, I’m developing a live site – I have no choice.) A few of the posts (one in English and about ten in Japanese, even though they are supposed to be identical duplicates – go figure!) act differently than the rest. Normally get_field() on a taxonomy is an object and get_field() on a file type is a string (the URL to the file). But in the case of the weird posts, get_field(taxonomy) is just an integer of the taxonomy ID, and get_field(file) is an array! Here are real var_dump’s from inside the post loop, for an example normal post and an example weird one:

A normal one is ID#4938 – Taxonomy get_field(‘preacher’,4938) looks like this:

object(stdClass)#4021 (10) {
  ["term_id"]=>
  int(89)
  ["name"]=>
  string(12) "Brian Bluett"
  ["slug"]=>
  string(12) "brian-bluett"
  ["term_group"]=>
  int(0)
  ["term_taxonomy_id"]=>
  int(106)
  ["taxonomy"]=>
  string(16) "message_preacher"
  ["description"]=>
  string(22) "Interim Pastor in 2014"
  ["parent"]=>
  int(0)
  ["count"]=>
  int(0)
  ["filter"]=>
  string(3) "raw"
}

And get_field(‘audio_file’) is simply the path to the file:

string(72) "http://oicjapan.org/wp-content/uploads/older-sermons/misc/2014-10-19.mp3"

A weird one is ID#4943 – Taxonomy get_field(‘preacher’,4943) is just the ID:

int(89)

And get_field(‘audio_file’) is an array:

array(8) {
  ["ID"]=>
  int(3993)
  ["id"]=>
  int(3993)
  ["alt"]=>
  string(0) ""
  ["title"]=>
  string(10) "2014-10-12"
  ["caption"]=>
  string(0) ""
  ["description"]=>
  string(0) ""
  ["mime_type"]=>
  string(10) "audio/mpeg"
  ["url"]=>
  string(72) "http://oicjapan.org/wp-content/uploads/older-sermons/misc/2014-10-12.mp3"
}

Anytime a post has this hiccup, all taxonomy fields and all file fields act this way – it is consistent within a given post.

Since there are only a few weird ones, I assume I can just make them again from scratch, but soon I’ll be mostly entrusting the site maintenance to non-techies, so I would like to know what is causing it so that I can prevent it either by code or training.