I'm working on a site that had an existing theme that used meta fields to store blocks (bad practice IMO but pre-block editor).

The problem is there are over 300 posts and all the different "blocks" are stored in what looks like repeated meta fields (i.e. flexible_content_1_content, flexible_content_2_content, etc). Does anyone know of a way to copy metadata content into the post content using WP CLI or custom code? Bonus points if I can copy the metadata to separate blocks in the block editor.

I'm working on a site that had an existing theme that used meta fields to store blocks (bad practice IMO but pre-block editor).

The problem is there are over 300 posts and all the different "blocks" are stored in what looks like repeated meta fields (i.e. flexible_content_1_content, flexible_content_2_content, etc). Does anyone know of a way to copy metadata content into the post content using WP CLI or custom code? Bonus points if I can copy the metadata to separate blocks in the block editor.

• post-meta
• block-editor
• sanitization
• post-content

• Write a WP CLI script to run through the posts and copy over the meta values into post content? Doesn't seem complicated. – vancoder Commented Aug 11, 2020 at 17:46

1 Answer 1

Here's an example of how to get the meta and set it as the post content. You would need to add all the meta keys to the $meta_fields array.

Obviously test this locally before running in production because it will overwrite whatever is currently in the post content.

function migrate_post_data() {   
    // Add all the meta keys you want to migrate to this array.
    $meta_fields = array(
        'flexible_content_1_content',
        'flexible_content_2_content'
    );

    // Get all the posts.
    $args = array(
        'post_type'      => 'post', // You may need to change this.
        'posts_per_page' => 400,
    );
    $posts = get_posts( $args );

    // Loop over each post.
    foreach ( $posts as $post )  {
        $meta_field_content = array();

        // Loop over each meta field and get their content, adding it to an array.
        foreach( $meta_fields as $meta_field ) {
            $content = get_post_meta( $post->ID, $meta_field, true );

            if ( ! empty( trim( $content ) ) ) {
                $meta_field_content[] = $content;
            }
        }

        if ( empty( $meta_field_content ) ) {
            continue;
        }

        // Set the the post content as whatever the meta fields were.
        $post_args = array(
            'ID' => $post->ID,
            'post_content' => implode( ' ', $meta_field_content ),
        );

        wp_update_post( $post_args );
    }
}