Over six months and several ACF Pro and WordPress version upgrades later we are still struggling with this issue. We have a ton of posts with custom field data. I’m beyond frustrated with this problem.
Thank you for this.
The user swears he always saves the post before previewing.
Yes, I have submitted a ticket. They acknowledge that there is a bug:
Unfortunately the issue with the preview appears to be related to a known bug with ACF and the WordPress block editor. The same issue can happen when previewing fields in an already published post. This is something that we’re planning to fix up in a future release.
In either case, the custom fields should show up in the frontend once the post has been published.
But they don’t think this could be the cause of custom field data not showing up on the frontend after scheduled posts are published.
Here is a screen recording showing the issue
For anyone else that runs into this issue. It appears to be a bug. I have been able to replicate it on two sites and will test it on more sites soon. It happens under the following conditions.
If a post with ACF fields is scheduled, and the scheduled post is then edited and any content is changed in the fields OR the main content area, whether the post is saved or not before clicking the preview button at the top of the window and selecting “Preview in new tab”, any custom field content will be gone in the preview. If you go directly from the preview window back to the All Posts page and preview the post from there the content in the fields will be gone. However, if you left the original edit tab open the fields will be there and you can re-save the post. If you then click the “View Post” link that briefly appears at the bottom of the window, the field content will be there.
The Advanced Editor Tools plugin worked for me. Thank you @joer!! I’ve been trying to solve this issue for years.
