I'm building a website and I need to have the Yoast description programmatically added after saving a post (a custom post type in my case).

Now, since I'm using Advanced Custom Fields, and I also need some custom fields populated programmatically, I created a function in functions.php and called it this way:

add_action( 'acf/save_post', 'atc_set_element_intro', 20 );

...so it's fired every time a post is saved. This is the function:

function atc_set_element_intro( $post_id ){
  if( get_post_type( $post_id ) == 'giochi' ){

    // [CUT]
    // Here I generate the strings ($intro and $intro_y) to fill the custom fields with 

    update_field( 'field_5d0be8f40addf', $intro, $post_id );
    update_post_meta( $post_id, '_yoast_wpseo_metadesc', $intro_y );
  } else {
    return;
  } 
}

Now, the "update_field" works perfectly fine, and it adds a value on a custom field of my choice. The "update_post_meta" isn't working, unless I add a die() or wp_die() after it. In that case, I see a blank screen on save, and then checking my post I see that it added the Yoast description I wanted. But of course I can't die() on that function.

I guess there's something after the execution of that function that rewrites the Yoast description. What can I do to prevent that? Thank you.

I'm building a website and I need to have the Yoast description programmatically added after saving a post (a custom post type in my case).

Now, since I'm using Advanced Custom Fields, and I also need some custom fields populated programmatically, I created a function in functions.php and called it this way:

add_action( 'acf/save_post', 'atc_set_element_intro', 20 );

...so it's fired every time a post is saved. This is the function:

function atc_set_element_intro( $post_id ){
  if( get_post_type( $post_id ) == 'giochi' ){

    // [CUT]
    // Here I generate the strings ($intro and $intro_y) to fill the custom fields with 

    update_field( 'field_5d0be8f40addf', $intro, $post_id );
    update_post_meta( $post_id, '_yoast_wpseo_metadesc', $intro_y );
  } else {
    return;
  } 
}

Now, the "update_field" works perfectly fine, and it adds a value on a custom field of my choice. The "update_post_meta" isn't working, unless I add a die() or wp_die() after it. In that case, I see a blank screen on save, and then checking my post I see that it added the Yoast description I wanted. But of course I can't die() on that function.

I guess there's something after the execution of that function that rewrites the Yoast description. What can I do to prevent that? Thank you.

• functions
• custom-field
• advanced-custom-fields
• plugin-wp-seo-yoast

1 Answer 1

After days of trying I managed to fix it myself.

Instead of using update_post_meta, I just did this:

$_POST[ "yoast_wpseo_metadesc" ] = $intro_y;

It works perfectly.

Hope this can help someone.