[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #10142: Add metadata support for taxonomy terms

WordPress Trac noreply at wordpress.org
Thu Sep 3 23:21:28 UTC 2015


#10142: Add metadata support for taxonomy terms
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 Reporter:  sirzooro         |       Owner:
     Type:  feature request  |      Status:  reopened
 Priority:  normal           |   Milestone:  Future Release
Component:  Taxonomy         |     Version:
 Severity:  normal           |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  needs-patch      |     Focuses:
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Comment (by flixos90):

 I wasn't able to join today's Slack meeting on the taxonomy enhancements,
 but I just read through the chat - and although I'm also one of the people
 who has been looking forward to have term meta included for quite a while,
 the more I think about it, the more hesitant I am:

 To me (and also others on the chat), the usage of metadata on posts is a
 clear distinctive feature of posts vs terms which I think should stay like
 that. Terms are simple objects, used to group posts together. If term meta
 was in Core, many people would probably add lots and lots of metadata to
 terms, which would basically lead to a similar behavior like when we have
 a post connected to another post (either with a plugin like P2P or a
 custom solution involving storing the other post's ID as meta).

 I don't like the idea that people possibly use terms for something that
 should actually be posts. I might be drastic in my opinion, but I
 personally see it like that: ''If my taxonomy needs to store other data
 than its name, title and description, it's not a taxonomy.'' It's a post
 that should allow to be connected to another post.

 The statement above has a few (very few) exceptions though. @krogsgard
 mentioned on Slack that a common use-case for term meta is the need for
 term images or term ordering. When I read this, it strengthened my opinion
 like so: if terms were to have images and an order field, I would never
 ever need to think about term meta again. And I think a lot of people who
 have run into this issue probably just thought the most straightforward
 way to solve this would be to add term meta. We have never thought of
 extending the `terms` table instead. But wouldn't it be possible to add a
 those two things into the table, in form of a `term_image` field (for an
 attachment ID) and a `menu_order` field (integer for the order)? This
 change could be incorporated into the improvements in #30262.

 Sorry for the long post, I had to put it into words here - but here's the
 gist of it :)
 It's not a big deal to add term meta by a plugin like
 https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-term-meta/ if someone absolutely needs
 it. But since the addition of this feature to Core would probably
 interfere with a lot of plugins, significantly reduce performance on term
 queries and (my opinion) confuse the original purpose of terms, I prefer
 extending the `terms` table just for those common use-cases which would
 enhance terms, but not bloat them up.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10142#comment:122>
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