Migration to native "disabled" layouts in ACF 6.5

[aaronmeder]

Hey everyone!

ACF 6.5 introduced a native feature to disable layouts, probably making this plugin obsolete.

Has anyone already tried to create a "migration" for layouts that were marked as hidden by this plugin to the new native "disabled" state?

Thanks!
Aaron

[steffenbew]

@aaronmeder It's great this feature is finally coming to ACF core!

We haven't looked into any migration plans yet. Would be cool though!

[arnespremberg]

I have started to look into this for our clients. Here's what I could find so far:

The update introduces a new meta key in the wp_postmeta table called _pageComponents_layout_meta.
That key contains serialized data representing two arrays: renamed and disabled. By appending the ID of our hidden fields to the disabled array, we can disable them as expected.

ACF itself does it by using the following integrated function:

advanced-custom-fields-pro/pro/fields/class-acf-field-flexible-content.php

			acf_update_metadata_by_field(
				$post_id,
				array(
					'name' => '_' . $field['name'] . '_layout_meta',
				),
				array(
					'disabled' => $disabled_layouts,
					'renamed'  => $renamed_layouts,
				)
			);

So in short, we could simply iterate over all posts, check which ones have the hidden layout field set to 1, and add these layout IDs to the disabled array in _layout_meta.

I'll be looking into this in one of our sites and maybe have GPT-5 take a shot at it 😌

[steffenbew]

@arnespremberg Thanks for investigating this further! Would be great to have a little snippet for this. How would you imagine to run this? Uploading a script? Integrating a "Migrate to ACF" button in the backend?

[arnespremberg]

Hi @steffenbew I opened a PR for this: #12

Not sure if that's the right way to implement it, but the loop that runs in there could also be run separately.