Corcel ACF Plugin

Fetch all Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) fields inside Corcel easily.

This Corcel plugin allows you to fetch WordPress custom fields created by the ACF plugin using the same syntax of Eloquent, from the Laravel Framework. You can use Eloquent models and Collections to improve your development, using the WordPress backend with any PHP application.

For more information about how Corcel works please visit the repository.

• Installation
• Usage
  • The Idea
  • What is Missing
  • Fields
• Contributing
  • Running Tests
• Licence

Version Compatibility

Installation

To install the ACF plugin for Corcel is easy:

composer require corcel/acf

Corcel is required for this plugin, but don't worry, if it's missing it will be installed as well.

Usage

This is a development version so the usage can change further. The desired behavior of this plugin is to allow this:

$post = Post::find(1);
echo $post->acf->url; // returns the url custom field created using ACF

Performance

When using something like $post->acf->url the plugin has to make some extra SQL queries to get the field type according ACF approach. So we created another way to get that without making those extra queries. You have only the inform the plugin what is the post type, as a function:

 // Extra queries way
 echo $post->acf->author_username; // it's a User field

 // Without extra queries
 echo $post->acf->user('author_username');

PS: The method names should be written in camelCase() format. So, for example, for the field type date_picker you should write $post->acf->datePicker('fieldName'). The plugin does the conversion from camelCase to snake_case for you.

The Idea

Using the default $post->meta->field_name in Corcel returns the value of the meta_value column in the wp_postmeta table. It can be a string, an integer or even a serialized array. The problem is, when you're using ACF this value can be more than that. If you have an integer, for example, it can be a post id, an user id or even an array of posts ids.

ACF has to make 2 (two) SQL queries to find out the field type, so according the type it has different behavior with the meta_value. For example, if the value is 45 and the post type is post_object, the value 45 is a post with ID 45. So, in this case, Corcel should return a Corcel\Post instance instead of just an integer.

First ACF fetches the meta_value in wp_postmeta table, where the meta_key is something like _field_name and the post ID is the ID of the post you want the custom field. The returned value is the field key and it looks like this field_57f421a2b81bd. With this key it fetches the corresponding post in wp_posts, where post_name = 'field_57f421a2b81bd'. With the results it gets the post_content value, a serialized array, deserialize it and gets the content on the type key. This is the field type. According it the ACF (and also this plugin) does the right thing.

This plugin works with a basic logic inside Corcel\Acf\Field\BasicField abstract class, that has a lot of useful functions to return the field key, the value, etc. The Corcel\Acf\FieldFactory is responsible to return the correct field instance according the field type, so, if the field type is post_object it return an instance of Corcel\Acf\Field\PostObject, and it will returns in the get() method an instance of Corcel\Post.

What is Missing

First we should create the fields classes and the test cases. After we have to setup how Corcel is going to work with the corcel/acf plugin, returning the custom field value in the format $post->meta->field or maybe $post->acf->field having different behavior (done!).

• Create more unit tests for Repeater field;
• Implement the Flexible Content field with unit tests (done!);

• Improve performance. Currently the plugin makes one SQL query for each field. This goal is to improve that using whereIn() clauses.

  Some fields are still missing (check table below and contribute).

Fields

Contributing

All contributions are welcome. Before submitting your Pull Request take a look on the following guidelines:

• Make your changes in a new git branch, based on the develop branch: git checkout -b my-fix-branch develop;
• Create your patch/feature, including appropriate test cases. Tests are necessary to make sure what you did is working and did not break nothing in the plugin;
• Run the unit tests and ensure that all tests are passing. Please, when submitting your PR paste the results of the phpunit command to facilitate the approval job;
• In GitHub, send a pull request to corcel/acf:develop, always. Do not send PR to our master branch! We encourage you to use git flow (https://github.com/petervanderdoes/gitflow-avh) workflow to make your life easier. It' not necessary, but it'll also be good for your development career;
• Make sure your code is following the PSR-2 conventions (http://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-2/).

Running Tests

To run the phpunit tests, execute phpunit (if you have a global PHPUnit executable) or try the following command:

./vendor/bin/phpunit

You should import the database.sql file to a database inside your local environment to make the tests working. Just unzip the tests/config/database.sql.zip file and set the database, user and password fields in tests/config/bootstrap.php.

If you want to access the WordPress Admin Panel just use username as admin and password 123456.

Licence

MIT License © Junior Grossi