[wp-hackers] 2.4 Feature Proposal: New general meta-data table

[Peter Westwood]

On 12 Oct 2007, at 07:37, Otto wrote:

> Probably some I left out. On the whole, I'm in favor of a combined
> table simply for the reason that the internal bits of WordPress need
> it. Why have a postmeta, options, commentsmeta, etc? One table can
> handle these better. We're doing weird stuff in WP too, like
> attachments as posts and other things that would be better served by
> good metadata. A refactoring of these is in order, and if a combined
> meta helps push that along, I'm all for it.

A single meta table makes much more sense than adding a new  
comment_meta table if we want to have meta information for comments  
(which some people do)
Moving options to a meta table is IMHO a bad idea - if you are going  
to do that you might as well just do away with the post table and  
comments tables as well and store all the data in one big table as  
key=>value pairs.
A meta table should just be for meta - i.e. key<>vlaue pairs which  
are related to a particular object type be it a comment/post/...

Plugins should be using these tables where they want to store that  
type of information - unfortunately a lot of plugin authors do not  
understand the flexibility that already exists in the WP db schema  
and so for example every new event plugin creates a new table - the  
fact that the posts table has the ability there to store other types  
of post (and to be fair an event is very similar it what it wants to  
store) and the posts table could support events as-is.

As for attachments -> making them post meta sounds like a really good  
idea - doing away with the dodgy linked page for an attachment which  
can have very hard to moderate comments would be a good idea!

westi
-- 
Peter Westwood <peter.westwood at ftwr.co.uk>
Blog: http://blog.ftwr.co.uk/
WordPress Plugins: http://blog.ftwr.co.uk/wordpress/