Comments on: When to (not) use a Custom Taxonomy

By: ebrahim

ebrahim — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 20:02:37 +0000

iam confused what is the different now between custom fields and tags???

By: Michael Soriano

Michael Soriano — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 20:44:26 +0000

thanks for this post. in summary – taxonomy = groupings vs postmeta = unique

By: Kathy Darling

Kathy Darling — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 15:43:25 +0000

Hi Otto, I’m coming back to your post months later. i still think there is a valid reason to sort by taxonomy. What if you have a post type “Articles” with a “subject” taxonomy and you wanted to show all the articles grouped by subject

Apple Subject
apple article 1
apple article 2

Bacon Subject
bacon article 1
bacon article 2

and so on. the subject taxonomy is still a ‘grouping’ of articles, where the terms are shared across more than one article. do you think this is possible with enough magic thrown at the posts_join and posts_orderby filters?

By: Jenny

Jenny — Wed, 23 May 2012 12:39:46 +0000

otto, could you answer my question at stackexchange?
http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/52998/how-to-restric-term-input-under-one-parent-or-a-term-group

By: kathy

kathy — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:19:04 +0000

i think i have been looking for exactly this. i have a taxonomy that i’ve limited to only 3 terms and have created my own tax metabox to make sure that a post can only ever have 1 value: featured, normal or excluded. it struck me that this is sort of post_meta territory but if querying by tax is significantly faster i think i will leave it as is.

By: Flo Nelson

Flo Nelson — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 20:11:41 +0000

Great article. Have been trying to get an understanding of the relationship between taxonomies and custom posts – very helpful

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 23:12:50 +0000

Indeed great article and agree taxonomies are a great way to manage everything in the Wordpress. While there are more to improve for recently implemented taxonomies (since 3.0) here is a great tool to help you order all terms for a given taxonomy, either by custom drag and drop or automatically by title, date, id, count, random etc Advanced Taxonomy Terms Order some of you might find this very useful as it already helped me allot.

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:41:48 +0000

Thanks Otto. Very helpful.

I’m working on geo websites at the moment that each cover one UK county. I’m using a place taxonomy structure to group villages round major towns to form local mini sites within each county. Meanwhile I’m using categories to describe types of entity (eg attractions, types of business), so giving two dimensions to the data.

Once again, thanks…

By: MGunner

MGunner — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 07:05:38 +0000

Hey Otto, quick thanks for a clear breakdown of this topic. Really made it understandable. I would buy you a beer but alas, at the time of this writing, it is now an empty glass.

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 04:06:32 +0000

Thank you so much for this post Otto, it’s just the thing I’ve been looking for regarding Taxonomies vs Postmeta.

Here’s an idea I’ve got for being able to order by a taxonomy:

Can you have a taxonomy term ALSO entered in as postmeta? I’m sure there’s probably some way to automate that, but taking from your TV shows example, yes every TV show has an Episode 1. So it makes sense to keep that as postmeta for ordering the episodes chronologically per each season.

However I could see cases where maybe you also want to query every Episode 1 from Season 1 of each TV show. Maybe somebody wants to check out all the pilot episodes… that doesn’t seem too out of the question to me. You’d then want to have a taxonomy for episode number in that case for easy querying.

Of course I guess this would only work with a taxonomy where you select/enter only 1 term. Otherwise I don’t think it would make sense.

Another example is I’m working on a Pokemon card database site. One piece of data I’m working with is the card name. I’d like to allow the user to sort cards alphabetically, so in that case it’s good to have the card name be postmeta.

But I can also see instances where a user might want to view all the Pikachu cards ever made (so card name = Pikachu). It would be easier to query if I ALSO had a Card Name taxonomy (non-hierarchal, only 1 term added for each post).

So I think there are a lot of cases where it could be good to have both postmeta and taxonomy term for certain items… what do you think? Any disadvantage to doing that rather than making complicated query/sorting functions?