[wp-hackers] Link metadata?

[Dougal Campbell]

Casey Bisson wrote:
>
> A while ago I proposed a comments_meta table[1], and at WordCamp I was 
> introduced to bbPress' meta table architecture: rather than have meta 
> tables for different types of content, there's just one meta table 
> that includes an extra column describing what content type the ID 
> links to.
Ahhh, I had forgotten about that. That's a good suggestion. I've also 
pondered the lack of link- and comment- meta, and a unified metadata 
table, indexed by content type would be a good evolution, I think. It 
would also aid in the future migration towards more generic CMS 
capabilities in core WP, since it would be extensible for future data types.

> All of that said, have you considered adding these links as posts? 
> Putting content in the posts table gets you free tools to add tags and 
> other metadata, makes the content easier to search (no need for 
> plugins that scatter the searching to all those other tables), and 
> allows you to open up the links to comments and other social activity.

That's what I was about to suggest, too (I think). Or more specifically, 
I was going to suggest either adding metadata to the main post, with 
info about the child links (could connect by linkid), or even by using a 
child-post (more technically, an attachment) to house the extra data. 
This isn't as elegant as attaching the metadata directly to the links in 
some way, but is pragmatic in that it shouldn't be too hard to 
implement. Done right, you could even reference the same link (by its 
link ID) from different posts, but using different link metadata in each 
instance. I could probably think of some insteresting use-cases for that.

-- 
Dougal Campbell <dougal at gunters.org>
http://dougal.gunters.org/
http://twitter.com/dougal
http://twitual.com/