ACF: Fields in Custom Table

This ACF plugin makes it possible to store ACF data in structured database tables instead of WordPress core meta tables.

It uses ACF's acf/update_field_group hook to create/update the database and then uses acf/save_post hook to store the data.

It was heavily inspired by Austin Ginder's post https://anchor.host/acf-custom-fields-stored-in-custom-table/.

Supported Fields

Text
Text Area
Number
Range
Email
URL
Password
Image
File
Wysiwyg Editor
oEmbed
Select
Checkbox
Radio Button
Button Group
True / False
Date Picker
Date Time Picker
Time Picker
Color Picker
Link
Post Object
Page Link
Relationship
Taxonomy
User

Relational Fields

This plugin supports the following relational field types: Post Object, Page Link, Relationship, Taxonomy and User.

It can store both single and multiple values based on the multiple option.

If it's a single value field, then the column type will be bigint(20) unsigned
If it's a multiple value field, then the column type will be longtext and the date will be stored in json format.

You can query relational fields with multiple values using using MySQL's function JSON_CONTAINS. Here is an example:

Table:

+---------+-------------------+--------+
| post_id |       title       | stores |
+---------+-------------------+--------+
|       1 | Lord of the Flies | [1,2]  |
|       2 | The Island        | [2]    |
|       3 | 1984              | [3]    |
+---------+-------------------+--------+

Query:

SELECT * FROM wp_acf_books WHERE JSON_CONTAINS(stores, 2, '$')

The query above will return "Lord of the Flies" and "The Island"

Filters

The plugin provides filters to allow developers to customize the plugin behavior:

Chaging table prefix

add_filter( 'acfict_table_prefix', function( $prefix, $tablename ) {
  return 'newprefix_';
}, 10, 2);

Disabling WP Post Meta storage

By default the data is still stored in WP Post Meta but you can disable it using acf filter acf/pre_update_value as such:


//Will disable WP Post Meta storage for all field groupd with "ACF: Fields in Custom Table" enabled.
add_filter( 'acf/pre_update_value', function( $default, $value, $post_id, $field )
{
  if( $field[ACF_FICT::SETTINGS_ENABLED] ) {
    return false;
  }

  return $default;
}, 10, 4);

ACF Compatibility

This plugin was tested with ACF 5 FREE Version .

eduardo-marcolino / acf-fields-in-custom-table

readme