• 0degreesk

• in reply to: Custom blocks inserted via Gutenberg editor returning JSON
• February 29, 2020 at 2:25 am

Here’s my solution. While this post hasn’t even been read, at least this will be here if someone else runs into the situation.

In a nutshell, the custom blocks that ACF can create for Gutenberg are stored as JSON in the content field which are then hidden by HTML comments.

While this hidden-JSON content is searchable and will cause an item to appear in the search result, the content itself is “invisible” to WordPress’ core get_the_excerpt() or get_the_content() functionality which you commonly use in search results. The result is a search result with no blurb.

The work-around I found for my project was to attempt to generate an excerpt. Then, if the excerpt was empty, try to generate a blurb by search for custom blocks.

The following example is a bit messy, but nobody’s even looked for the past three weeks, so… if you have questions, I’ll try to help.

<div class="search-blurb"><?php

  // Attempt to generate an excerpt
  $excerpt = get_the_excerpt();

  // If no excerpt is generated, try to generate an excerpt from ACF blocks
  if ( !$excerpt ) {

    // Grab ACF blocks  from page
    if ( function_exists( 'get_field' ) ) {
      $pid = get_post();
      if ( has_blocks( $pid_content ) ) {
        $blocks = parse_blocks( $pid->post_content );

        // Cycle through each block
        foreach ( $blocks as $block ) {

          // If the result is not empty, you have a blurb, so move on
          if ( $excerpt != '' ) {
            break;

          // Otherwise, $excerpt is still empty so try to fill it
          } else {

            /* In the following if/else block, I run through the custom blocks that I assume will have content worthy of a search result blurb */

            if ( $block['blockName'] === 'acf/narrow-content-block' ) {
              // Uncomment the following section to SEE what JSON you have to work with
              /*
              echo 'acf/narrow-content-block<br /><pre>';
              print_r( $block );
              echo '</pre>';
              */

              // The $block['attrs'['data']['narrow_content_content'] property has the best chance to generate blurb-worthy content in this custom block
              $excerpt .= $block['attrs']['data']['narrow_content_content'];

            } elseif ( $block['blockName'] === 'acf/image-video-block' ) {
              /*
              echo 'acf/image-video-block<br /><pre>';
              print_r( $block );
              echo '</pre>';
              */
              $excerpt .= $block['attrs']['data']['img_vid_text'];

            } elseif ( $block['blockName'] === 'acf/general-content-block' ) {
              /*
              echo 'acf/general-content-block<br /><pre>';
              print_r( $block );
              echo '</pre>';
              */
              $excerpt .= $block['attrs']['data']['general_content_content'];

            } elseif ( $block['blockName'] === 'acf/inset-cta-block' ) {
              /*
              echo 'acf/inset-cta-block<br /><pre>';
              print_r( $block );
              echo '</pre>';
              */
              $excerpt .= $block['attrs']['data']['inset_cta_content'];

            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }

  // Generate a blurb from the $excerpt you've generated
  $excerpt = substr( $excerpt, 0, 260);
  $result = substr( $excerpt, 0, strrpos( $excerpt, ' ') );
  echo ( $result ? strip_tags( $result ).'...' : '' );
?></div>