Simplify Taxonomy System

[mikeschinkel]

Mark Jaquith has said he would like to see WordPress ​Simplify taxonomy table structure by merging term and term taxonomy tables.

Basically the idea (I think) is to merge the wp_terms table into the wp_term_taxonomy table. Will we keep the name wp_term_taxonomy or will it get changed to another table name, with a different schema, of course? And what should the updated schema be? Further, would doing this drive addition of ​taxonomy meta?

If this is going to be something addressed in WordPress it would be nice to kickstart the process sooner than later. This is coming up because it's a concern mentioned during our ​object relationships plugin discussion.

[nacin]

The general thought has been to denormalize wp_terms and wp_term_taxonomy by adding the name and slug fields to wp_term_taxonomy. This will allow us to avoid a join and ultimately phase out the table. Unfortunately, most of our API passes around term ID, rather than TT ID, so this will end up being nearly impossible. Rather, we'd likely need a new term/taxonomy API - probably object-oriented, if only because we've used up the function namespace for the existing API - that can be built with a future schema in mind.

Any desire to overhaul taxonomy from the ground up will need to come from a series of major discussions on the project's direction, not to mention a scope session, and won't happen in the near future. Sounds to me like that makes this ticket maybelater.

[scribu]

Subscribing, just in case.

[mikeschinkel]

Replying to nacin:

Cool! Thanks for the details. I'll set to "maybelater."