Known Issues

All field groups created with the Advanced Custom Fields plugin are shown as empty visible metaboxes when editing a post irrelevant of those field group’s location rules.

This is due to a decision in Gutenberg to override the display:none CSS that ACF adds to “placeholder” metaboxes – used to update metaboxes dynamically whilst editing the post.

Status: Resolved.

All field groups shown in the “content area” look awkward, detached and slightly broken. More care should have gone into the styling of metaboxes to avoid such a disjointed UI and UX.

Status: This is also a known issue that has been bumped to WordPress 5.0.1.

Another highly used feature in ACF is our AJAX powered validation. This allows developers to highly customize the validation process via PHP whilst providing convenient feedback to the user when a field value does not meet its requirements.

Status: We’re continuing to work on bringing validation to AJAX blocks. We’ve been waiting for the Gutenberg team to provide custom validation hooks which would make this possible in a unified way, and hook into all the default page save logic.

A bug was reported where consecutive get_field() calls would use the same cached value even if the site was switched via switch_to_blog().

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

A bug within the post_template location rule class caused incorrect choices to appear in the location rule dropdown. Choices were displayed as “Template Title” => “template-file-name.php” instead of “template-file-name.php” => “Template Title”.

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

A bug found in the text and textarea field validation function caused an incorrect character count when validating a value containing special characters.

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

A bug found in the “Local Fields” logic caused all metaboxes to appear in reverse order.

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

A bug found in the acf_get_meta() function caused issues when copying meta values for revisions and previews. This bug affected serialized array values and caused the flexible content field to appear empty when previewing or restoring a revision.

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

A bug found in the get_field_object() function prevented a field from being loaded by it’s key.

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

A bug found in the get_sub_field() function caused incorrect values to be returned for some sub fields. This issue was seen most when a sub field existed with a “name” value equal to a “field type” such as “text” or “image”.

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

A bug found in the logic for syncing field groups (from Local JSON) caused the imported fields to lose their children.

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

A bug found in acf_update_metadata() function caused values from the Options Page to be incorrectly escaped causing multiple backslashes.

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

The function register_field_group() was accidentally removed.

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

A bug was quickly reported and fixed that throws a JS error called Object.e.getPreference. JS errors have a tendency to snowball into bigger problems such as unresponsive buttons and broken functionality. If you are experiencing any issues when editing a post, please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files to get the patched JS.

Tip: You can also trick ACF into re-updating itself by editing the main “acf.php” plugin file and changing the two references of “5.7.2” to “5.7.1”. This will allow WP to check for plugin updates and you can then re-update the plugin.

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

A bug has been found where ACF is incorrectly returning the “default value” for fields that have no value. If you are experiencing any issues where ACF functions are returning undesired values, please edit the file ‘includes/api/api-field.php’ and change line 1083 to the following:

function acf_maybe_get_field( $selector, $post_id = false, $strict = true ) {

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

A bug in conditional logic JS is causing validation issues for newly added flexible content layouts. If you are experiencing any incorrect validation errors, please re-download the plugin files and contact our support team if problems persist.

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

An over eager esc_js() function is causing character issues with the acf.fields.google_map.url value. This may prevent the Google Map autocomplete feature from working. Please edit the file ‘includes/fields/class-acf-field-google-map.php’ and change line 300 to the following:

if( acf ) acf.fields.google_map.url = '<?php echo $url; ?>';

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

This bug is caused by a missing step attribute on the number input. Please edit the file ‘includes/fields/class-acf-field-range.php’ and change line 101 to the following:

$html .= acf_get_text_input(array(
    'type'  => 'number', 
    'id'    => $atts['id'] . '-alt', 
    'value' => $atts['value'],
    'step'  => $atts['step']
));

Status: Solved for 5.6.3.

A bug in the Clone field is causing display problems when used as a sub field within a Flexible Content layout.

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

This is expected behavior added in v5.5.13 and enabled by default in 5.6.0. ACF now removes the default WP custom fields metabox in an attempt to speed up the load times of the post edit page. This feature can be disabled with the following code.

add_filter('acf/settings/remove_wp_meta_box', '__return_false');

A bug in the location rule logic is causing both the Post and Page rules to incorrectly match when using the != operator.

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

A bug in this location rule is preventing the ‘all’ value from working as expected. Please note that ‘user_role = all’ can be achieved with the User Form location rule. Try changing the rule to ‘user_form = all’.

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

Recent changes to the core acf_field class have caused a conflict with some 3rd party field types (such as the image crop and component field types) that extend core ACF fields (such as the image and repeater field types) causing the core fields to render twice. Its most likely that the 3rd party plugin has released an update to solve this issue, but if not, please add an empty initialize() to the 3rd party field class. More info can be found on this github issue.

function initialize() {
        
        /* do nothing */
            
    }

Recent changes to the ‘acf/save_post’ action are preventing any modifications to the $_POST['acf'] data (during the ‘acf/save_post’ action) to be ignored. Also, any custom code triggering the ‘acf/save_post’ action will fail silently unless an array of values is defined as a second parameter.

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

This problem is caused by the above Issues modifying $_POST data and the acf/save_post action issue and is preventing the basic uploader from saving the uploaded attachment ID.

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

This problem is being caused by some WP core code modifying the $_POST data during the menu save action. The intention of this WP code is to prevent PHP max_input_vars limitations – which is great – but is preventing multiple ‘array type’ values form being saved.

We have opened a ticket with WP and found a neat fix for ACF PRO!

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

This problem is being caused by a minor change to the options page logic and will affect those who register options pages directly in the functions.php file root (not within the ‘acf/init’ action).

Status: Solved. Please re-download the ACF PRO plugin files.

Currently you cannot enable pagination for Repeater fields if they are subfields of a Flexible Content or Repeater field. We will be introducing support for this in a later version.

For ACF Blocks using blockVersion: 2 and jsx: true (both defaults for block.json blocks), your php template for the block cannot start with a HTML comment. If it does, your block will crash when injecting the preview from the server as React cannot add references to HTML comments, and ACF Blocks needs to attach one to the first element in your template.