[Plugin: Events Manager] conflict w/ Advanced Custom Fields: arrays getting "double-serialized&

FWIW, I have custom attributes turned off in EM, because of the “deprecated attributes” issue. I’m trying to use ACF instead (because the UI is so much more flexible/palatable to our client).

Events Manager folks– any chance the following fix (or equivalent) could make it into your next rev?

I’m pretty sure I’ve found the conflict between EM and ACF. In EM’s classes/em-event.php, at line 625-640 (in ver. 5.1.8.5), all post_meta fields get updated — even if you’ve disabled event attributes in Settings. That’s the part that’s causing the conflict: EM is serializing the field, and ACF serializing it too, not imagining any other plugin would modify its fields.

So here’s the fix: at line 629, I changed

}elseif($key == 'event_attributes'){

to

}elseif($key == 'event_attributes' && get_option('dbem_attributes_enabled')){

This way, if you choose not to enable EM’s attributes feature, then EM doesn’t assume all available post_meta to be attributes, and won’t do anything to them (e.g., unwanted serialization). This fix doesn’t let you use both EM’s attributes feature and other plugins’ custom fields, but that seems like a reasonable trade-off.

Maybe for next ver release?

Thank you …

I’ll add that as it should be that way, but not sure what you mean about serialized attributes, I don’t believe we do that anymore, we just save each attribute as a post custom field.

We use update_post_meta/delete_post_meta and insert the raw data

Thanks, Marcus. The fix above makes this moot, but FWIW it looks like the serialization happens in function save_events(), same file, line 1681:

$event['event_attributes'] = serialize($event['event_attributes']);

aha i see, that shouldn’t be used at all though, it’s remenants of version 4 when events weren’t custom post types. the values in that array are now single post meta values.

does any adverse behaviour occur here, or is it just the fact that this field is serialized twice?

Hi- sorry for the lag. Yeah, the adverse behavior is that the twice-serialized values can’t be read by any other plugins that are expecting once-serialized values — which is what happened to me with ACF: I’d make some selections, click Update, and then when their control read the values back out of the field, it didn’t see anything it recognized, so the control wouldn’t re-populate.

Aside from plugin conflicts, the values can’t be queried, either — at least not in the usual way.

Anyway, thanks for the fix. It’ll save me the trouble of re-applying it with each upgrade. ??

What fix are you talking about? This is still a problem on a clients site using the latest ACF and Events Manager plugin.

I’ve never managed to reproduce ACF issues, so if you can, please start a new thread and describe how exactly you set up ACF to reproduce this.