This thread is resolved. Here is a description of the problem and solution.
Problem: The client reported that some ACF Field Groups were duplicated when new languages were added to their site. They inquired whether it was safe to delete these duplicates and how to prevent such duplication in future projects. Solution: We identified that the duplication occurred because the ACF Field Groups were set as translatable in the WPML settings. To resolve this, we advised the client to set the ACF Field Groups to 'Not Translatable' in the WordPress Dashboard under WPML > Settings > Post Type Translation. This change prevents future duplications by ensuring that field groups do not create copies when new languages are added. The client should safely remove any existing duplicates, as they are no longer necessary.
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I’ve just tested it and everything is working great — thanks for that!
We’ve come across another issue related to field groups. Please let me know if you’d prefer that we create a new support ticket, but since you already have access to the site, I thought you might be able to guide me here.
It seems that some field groups were duplicated when we added the new languages. We’ve disabled the duplicates for now, and everything works as expected.
Is this a known behavior, and do you have any guidance on how to handle it? Also, would it be safe to delete the duplicated groups to keep things clean, or is there a recommended approach? Finally, is there a way to prevent this from happening again on future projects?
When you go to ACF → Field Groups, you’ll see that some field groups, such as industries, appear 7–8 times. The same seems to apply to Products and a few other field groups, which appear to have been duplicated.
I’ve deactivated the duplicates and kept only one active version of each field group.
I’m not completely sure how this happened, so I wanted to check with you if this could be related to adding new languages. Is it possible that the ACF field groups were duplicated during that process?
Thank you for the clarification. Here is my educated guess:
When the ACF Field Group was set as translatable from WPML Settings, the groups were translated to the second language (either copied or translated, depending on the setting)
Now that we set that post type to "Not Translatable," all the copied and translated items show in the list as WPML creates a copy for each translation and now that it is not translatable all show in one language.
So please remove all the additional ones and with keeping the Field Group translation option to "Not Translatable" which is the default one, this should not happen again.
My apologies — I forgot to mention that this started happening a few months ago when we were implementing additional languages.
I have a question regarding the setup: how do you configure a group to be non-translatable?
Is it possible that the group was previously set as translatable when we added more languages, and could that have caused the fields to become duplicated somehow?
That is correct, it might be the case that on WordPress Dashboard> WPML > Settings> Post Type Translation the "acf-field-group" row was set to as translatable (Which is not recommended) during the language addition, and that was the cause of the problem.
The good point is that now it is set as not translatable, and everything works as expected.
