@blindmikey We’re going to do something similar using the Local JSON feature, which I believe was added in ACF 5 (in Dec 2014?):
http://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/local-json/
Each field group gets saved into its own file, so you never have to deal with large files full of fields. Unfortunately the JSON filenames aren’t very friendly, but the workflow is so clean (since 5.3.1) that you shouldn’t need to edit fields manually very often anyway.
Also see:
http://support.advancedcustomfields.com/forums/topic/the-acf-json-workflow/
Works perfectly for me too, I’ve already started writing some custom scripts to take advantage of this feature (such as an integration with the Faker library for auto-populating a complex ACF site with dummy data). This has opened up a whole range of new possibilities for us, thanks again!
This workflow issue has affected our dev team too, so preventing it from changing the timestamp during sync would be ideal.
Is there any way to take this a step further and prevent the timestamp from changing unless changes are actually detected in the Field Group? I was able to hack something together to do this inside the core/json.php file, in the acf_write_json_field_group() method but the code wasn’t exactly clean.
It would probably be better if this could happen when the fields are saved to the DB so the updated timestamp never changes (and the JSON would be overwritten with the same timestamp), but I’m not sure how difficult this could be.
Having said all that, the scenario of one of our developers saving a Field Group without making any changes is pretty rare, the sync issue is a higher priority.
Thanks again for looking into this!
