Hey,
long time no see 🙂
For the particular theme I refactored the sections on the page with the massive amount of ACF-Groups into subpages with respective ACF-Groups each. That sped up the process on each of the subpages of course.
It was a cumbersome (but fun) little Weekend Project to migrate the data that was already there to this new “schema” with a lot of scripting and custom SQL-operations (invoked with Sequel Pro) to get the data from the fields into the fields of the new subpages.
I am not so much into these kind of projects anymore, but nowadays I would just do it with a Headless CMS (Contentful and the like) if there was a way to communicate it to the customer. Then you could get your data from there into your WordPress theme via their php-sdk.
Using a Headless CMS has many other advantages that you have to buy with some additional work of course (page preview-process setup, …) – and these of course won’t sell so well (or it could be their USP) if you try to make a complete WordPress theme for Themeforest/et al.
I still think ACF is cool for a lot of projects and I have nothing but fond memories 🙂
All the best to John and ACF
Hi John,
nice idea – I’ll give it a try. Maybe thats a quicker solution then refactoring.
Thanks 🙂
Hi John,
thank you so much for your quick reply.
Writing a theme is as with every other software project: It grows and can become a “monster” (Thinking of Lehman’s Laws …). I get what you are saying and it was never intended to be this big. Requirements change over time and that can become difficult.
So the best bet would be to rebuild the logic of my theme.
There seem to be some tools that help in refactoring:
https://github.com/StoutLogic/acf-migrations
I am going to give that a try.
Still open for tricks or links if anyone has ideas 🙂
Cheers
Just a thought:
I have no experience with writing a plugin as huge as ACF and I can only wonder:
Would it be possible to track if a field has been changed with JS and sent only that change out for saving separately? Like, doing this on my own on top of ACF?
(I get that circumventing the WP save routine is not a good idea for the consistency of the DB.)
PS: For anyone interested – here some info on how to move fields to other post
https://support.advancedcustomfields.com/forums/topic/how-to-move-fields-to-another-post/
https://www.logicspot.com/development/advanced-custom-fields-quick-hack-to-move-a-field-to-another-group/
