I think you are right: my tone was inappropriate. I suppose I was frustrated at the time having to read through ‘update_field’ for the hundredth time.
Ultimately I believe two things though.
- The ACF team do what they do for profit and there is nothing wrong with that. The free version is an on-ramp to the amazing full version which is ultimately a consumer product. While I agree with you that the prices are ridiculously low, this is their chosen business model and it doesn’t change the fact that they are selling a product and providing follow-up services, most of which, like this forum, are fantastic. Bottom line, ACF is not a charity organisation or NGO. The low price does not excuse deficiencies in the product.
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Secondly, any decent documentation should specify the parameters and return values in a systematic manner, eg: https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/update_post_meta . This is standard practice across the coding world because it is so obviously necessary. ACF has been around long enough to simply lay out these items in a standardised way for the sake of developers. I don’t think it is too much to ask. If it were an open source project I might consider changing the docs myself.
I agree with you that I am being fussy but I stick by my point that the ACF team should improve their documentation, or provide supplementary advanced documentation, for the sake of their developer customers. Simply specify the full set of parameters, return values, types, caveats, etc.
Why not put this in the documentation? The documentation does not even mention the potential return values.
Bump.
This is a real issue if planning to add a bunch of advanced customs fields to images for content creators to enhance image data. Once they have inserted the image into the post, there is no way for them to edit that data without opening up the media library, finding the image and editing it there, which is not really tenable, first because it is a atrocious workflow, and secondly it is an advanced step to teach content creators, especially on blogs with multiple editors/authors who aren’t tech/wordpress savvy.
Ok, I now understand the issue properly.
The way my multisite is set up is that the MAIN SITE uses a custom theme, and the sub sites use a child theme of that theme. For this reason I don’t think I can simply use the PHP code specifying the fields for the sub sites in the MAIN SITE’s functions.php, or load up the fields through JSON in the MAIN SITE, as I don’t actually want the fields active on the parent theme.
I will have to come up with something else now that I better understand the issue, but I see that this is not actually a bug so it is resolved.
@hube2 thank you very much for your help and gratz on solving 666 o_o
