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

[Stephen Rider]

If this will eliminate goofy things such as the table_prefix being  
embedded in various  fieldnames, I'm all for it!  :)

Kidding aside, I think this is a good idea.  I also kind of like  
Jared's idea of a table for the meta data itself, and a separate  
table linking it to the various objects.  It's worth consideration,  
at the least.  I think it might lead to some interesting and  
unanticipated flexibility.

At first blush I was hesitant at the concept of this also including  
the Options, but... (as Otto points out) so long as this is  
abstracted behind the add and update options functions, it shouldn't  
be a big problem for plugin designers.

Stephen

On Oct 4, 2007, at 10:43 AM, Austin Matzko wrote:

> For WordPress 2.4, I propose that we add a general meta-data table.
> It would be similar in structure to the current postmeta and usermeta
> tables, except with an additional field specifying the domain of the
> meta-data.
>
> There are at least a couple of benefits to such a table:
>
> - We could have meta-data for comments and categories.
> Others have proposed meta tables for the comments [1]; rather than
> adding meta tables seriatim, a general meta-data table would meet that
> need and offer the possibility of actually reducing the total number
> of tables.
>
> - It would provide a better place for plugins to store data.
> Currently, most plugins---when they don't have enough data to justify
> creating their own table---store data in the options table.  I think
> there are disadvantages to bloating the options table, one of which is
> that WP loads almost all options into the object cache.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> [1] http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2659
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