Questions about Custom field format

This support ticket is created 4 years, 10 months ago. There's a good chance that you are reading advice that it now obsolete.

This is the technical support forum for Toolset - a suite of plugins for developing WordPress sites without writing PHP.

Everyone can read this forum, but only Toolset clients can post in it. Toolset support works 6 days per week, 19 hours per day.

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
8:00 – 12:00	8:00 – 12:00	8:00 – 12:00	8:00 – 12:00	8:00 – 12:00	-	-
13:00 – 17:00	13:00 – 17:00	13:00 – 17:00	13:00 – 17:00	13:00 – 17:00	-	-

Supporter timezone: America/New_York (GMT-04:00)

Tagged: Import and export, Setting up custom fields, Types plugin

This topic contains 1 reply, has 2 voices.

Last updated by Christian Cox 4 years, 10 months ago.

Assisted by: Christian Cox.

Author

Posts

February 12, 2020 at 4:46 pm #1505563

Jeffrey

I am trying to hire a programmer to build a custom plugin for a course schedule system. I prefer that plugin working fine with Toolset so that I can perform any changes with Toolset in the future. I have made custom post type to be compatible with Toolset, since I can see all custom post types list on the dashboard of Toolset. I do also try to make custom fields to be compatible with Toolset as well. then tried to control Post Fields by Toolset. Got notes below
"
Note: Some of the field types are disabled for conversion because they're using a significantly different data format, which is not compatible with the current field type. "

Do you have any suggestions about that? what information should I show the programmer to let them completely know that? can you please share links with me for both custom post types and custom fields?
Thanks!

February 12, 2020 at 7:44 pm #1505797

Christian Cox

Hello, some field types aren't easily converted to Types control. Some fields like checkboxes groups are stored in serialized data formats in the database, so importing them from a 3rd-party is not a good idea. The options for select fields and radio fields are also stored in serialized data structure that isn't easy to import. Other fields use special data types. For example, Toolset stores dates as Unix timestamps. Some other systems store dates in a different format, so they would not be compatible with Toolset dates. We suggest you create radio, select, and date fields first in Toolset, then import values into those fields in postmeta if necessary. Your 3rd-party developer can use Toolset's field slugs to set postmeta values. Toolset's field slugs have a prefix of 'wpcf-' in the database's postmeta table. We do not suggest you try to import checkboxes, since the format for these fields is serialized and complex.

Does this help answer your question?