Saving custom metabox data with a twist

Question

I've got more than a few metaboxes being used with a custom post type and I'm running into an issue where my data is not being saved as expected.

Here is the relevant part of the code, and its within a function hooked to save_post.

// Loop through our custom metabox post data
foreach ($_POST['product'] as $key => $value) {
    // Clear the previous featured product if it needed
    if ($key == 'homefeature' && $value == 'on') {
        $wpdb->query(
            "
            UPDATE      $wpdb->postmeta
            SET         meta_value = 'off'
            WHERE       meta_key = 'the_prefix_homefeature'
                        AND meta_value = 'on'
            "
        );
    }

    // Update meta
    update_post_meta($post_ID, 'the_prefix_' . $key, $value);
}

The query seems to work just fine (I've tested it outside of Wordpress) but in the end the product will not be flagged as the homefeature. The weirdest thing is that if I put a die in after the above loop finishes, it seems to work as expected.

It almost seems like Wordpress is caching the query or something. Any help figuring out why this is happening would be great, and let me know if you need more info/code.

Answer 1

I know save_post is called twice when a post is saved. The fact that die() solves your problem indicates that the second call is undoing the first, perhaps?

save_post will also be called on autosave, so you might want to eliminate those too.