[wp-hackers] Best pratice categories ordering

[The WordPress Web Warlock]

Al 15/06/2011 16:06, En/na Leo Baiano ha escrit:
> To avoid compatibility problems in future it would be interesting, instead
> of creating afield in the table, create a relationship table?

Hello,

A plugin I'm working in (neither released) uses term metadata for that 
(and other features). That is, I'm adding just a single term_meta table 
for a bunch of things.
I prefer to add a single multiuses table, whose rows and data can be 
cached and processed at init, than a field in an existing table; or 
worse, using a brand new table for each feature added.
Besides, this way I can add different order fields or values for the 
very same term (which you cannot do with a single field). This makes 
sense because other of the term meta features is to allow any term to 
have any number of parents, and often is needed that the term be sorted 
differently depending on the parent it's being viewed from.
A quick example: let's say you've got categories for "People with H" and 
"People with S". You might feel that Homer Simpson belongs to both: as 
"Homer Simpson" when listed from "People- H", and "Simpson, Homer" when 
listed from "People-S". If shown alone or in a batch (like a tag cloud), 
the category would be "Homer Simpson"; shown in the (special) category 
widget, then would apply the  "viewed from" stuff (the custom order, 
name, and description also). You can see that working in my site, FWIW.
There are already plugins to add some kind of term metadata in the repo 
(I think about three), so if you're interested just in this feature, you 
can use some of them to add the table and modify the widgets by 
yourself. But if you want that feature to be compatible/used with other 
features altogether (and not only compatible with possible future 
versions/implementations of the same feature/structure), you should 
design that with the big picture in mind.
Please note that with the termmeta method you can also namespace the key 
for the order: you can use my_plugin_term_order, instead of just 
menu_order or term_order or whatever. A good namespacing (which is 
*always* a good practice) would for certain avoid any compatibility 
problems with other implementations of the same feature that you didn't 
by yourself: they'd have another namespace.

Best,

Xavier