Good day, all. I have been experimenting with ACF’s ‘Group’ and ‘Tab’ layout fields in order to improve their presentation within the WordPress Gutenberg editor for the custom post type I associated with an ACF field group. I noticed the MySQL “postmeta” table retains all the ACF custom field edits, even after I delete the unused fields and sub-fields when devising group and tab configurations.
Unfortunately, the retained postmeta table ACF field and sub-field records are interfering with the data returned in my custom posts. This may result from the same-named “metakey” column field values, although this should not be an issue since each “postmeta” record is assigned a unique ID value. That is, I used the same ACF custom field “label” and “field” names, but I deleted previous incarnations of the same. I would have assumed ACF purges the appropriate “postmeta” records once their corresponding ACF custom fields & sub-fields are deleted from an ACF custom field group, but this does not seem to be the case.
To mitigate this issue, I guess I will have to manually delete these records, although I am hesitant to do so, because this may produce orphaned records in the MySQL “posts” table. Therefore, I may need to delete records in the “posts” table as well. This is a hassle, especially when considering the underlying WordPress database structures are very denormalized, making it more tedious to trace the table-to-table relationships.
Has anyone encountered a similar problem? I would appreciate your feedback. Thank you.
