WordPress has had its first real public drama the last few weeks, and there has been concern over the future of the project. As we host hundreds of WordPress sites in different configurations, this affects us and our clients tremendously.

If you’re not familiar with the goings on behind the scenes of the world’s biggest content management system, we’ll sum it up briefly:

Recently, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, and co-founder of the WordPress publishing software, went on the attack against WP Engine, one of the largest and most established WordPress hosting companies in the industry. The details of the disagreement are complex, and not entirely relevant to this communication.

WordPress also took control of and renamed a very popular plugin that was maintained by WP Engine, “Advanced Custom Fields”. This plugin is used in many of our websites and extends the functionality of WordPress considerably.

This situation has caused uncertainty and confusion in the development community. Our main priority is the security and stability of the websites we maintain. Our sites depend heavily on all parties involved in this disagreement, so we hope for an amicable solution in the near future.

What this might mean for the websites we host and maintain

 in the short term is connecting the WordPress updates and plugins to the appropriate tool they were built with. Most of this is “behind the scenes” and will not affect our clients. However, there may be some situations where a small amount of billable time is necessary to keep a website secure and stable. We will communicate directly with those clients if and when necessary.

We thank all of our clients for their trust. Clients host their websites with us so that they don’t have to feel the stress of these situations, and that’s exactly our intention in communicating these important events.

Depending on how these disagreements are resolved, we may have updates in the future. Stay tuned. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any questions you may have. We’re here to help!

Sincerely, 
Jason Clark
Chief Marketing Officer
VIA Studio / eResources


Hosting

WordPress

An update on the current WordPress situation

In Advanced Custom Fields, there is the Post Object field that allows you to select a post resource from your WordPress website. This field can return the actual post object or the post ID. I ran into a problem where I wanted to reuse this field but with dynamic content (posts from another WordPress website). After doing some digging into the ACF code base, I found a method to make this work.

Using the existing Post Object field did not work as there is a non-pluggable function deep in that code that sets the database connection. Copying this field and tweaking it (as a new field) also doesn't work as the Javascript on the frontend is looking for that field name.

From there I moved to use the Select Field. With the Select field, there are multiple filters and hooks you can use to customize the field. For our purposes, there is a Select field with the name "external_resource". 

Using the ACF and Select2 Javascript filters, upon typing in the Select field, query the external Wordpress JSON API and return the appropriate resources (ID and title). The ID gets saved to the database and then use "load_field" hook to fetch populate the field (so it appears correctly in ACF).

First we need to setup the initial Javascript filter. Using this, we can modify the Select2 augments so it will query the external API.

Inside this, we can make sure it's the field we want to modify. From there, we can actually modify the Select2 arguments. Then we send the search query to the Search endpoint and then returning the ID and the title. 

Now that the front end portion is working, we need to get the back end ACF to work. One of the things ACF does with Select fields is verify the value of the Select field with possible values. Because of this, setting the field with dynamic choices will break ACF and leave it with a blank value.

To get around this, the "load_field" hook can be used to dynamically populate the contents of the Select field. Since only IDs exist, an additional call needs to be made to the external WordPress API to fetch the title. 

Now the Select field can populated dynamically and work both on the front end and back end with an external WordPress source.

Custom Dev

Backend Development

Dynamic Select Fields with Advanced Custom Fields

Branding

Web Design

Accessibility

Hubspot

Collateral

GoodMaps

Art Direction

Graphic Design

Marketing Strategy

Websites

Louisville Collegiate School

We strongly believe in open-source technologies. Our CMS of choice is WordPress, not just for its ease-of-use, but the large community that pushes its development to new and exciting places. Active in the Wordpress community, we also develop 

WordPress

WordPress: Case Studies

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GoodMaps

02

Louisville Collegiate School

WordPress: Blog Posts

An update on the current WordPress situation

Dynamic Select Fields with Advanced Custom Fields