[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #26946: Decouple the Menu System from Posts and Taxonomies

[WordPress Trac]

#26946: Decouple the Menu System from Posts and Taxonomies
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 Reporter:  MikeSchinkel                          |       Owner:
     Type:  enhancement                           |      Status:  closed
 Priority:  normal                                |   Milestone:
Component:  Menus                                 |     Version:  trunk
 Severity:  normal                                |  Resolution:  wontfix
 Keywords:  needs-patch dev-feedback 2nd-opinion  |     Focuses:
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Comment (by nacin):

 While I probably would have let this play out for a bit before closing the
 ticket, I think it's also helpful to be honest when an idea is dead in the
 water from the start. Conversation can continue even when a ticket is
 closed. I strongly agree with not doing this. I have some good news,
 though.

 Being involved in building menus in 3.0 probably subtracted a few years
 from my life. What we ended up with worked, but obviously has its issues.
 That said, I don't think the schema is the problem. I think we were just
 using custom post types and custom taxonomies for the first time and did
 it the "long way". It ended up being over-engineered in nearly every way,
 and it could benefit from a lot of TLC on the internals.

 Anyway — the primary reason you've proposed for doing this is that custom
 taxonomies share term objects. This is a design decision dating to 2.3,
 but it isn't the way it has to be. In fact, it doesn't require significant
 surgery, and re-doing all of menus *certainly* would not happen any
 quicker than the outpatient surgery required. Re-doing menus is terrible
 waste of time — even a fraction of the time that would otherwise be spent
 on that could be used to improve menus in general, without butchering the
 schema.

 The complete plan is outlined in http://make.wordpress.org/core/2013/07/28
 /potential-roadmap-for-taxonomy-meta-and-post-relationships/. Solving the
 user issue presented here simply requires completing the pre-requisite
 steps that are needed before actually merging the tables, doing term meta,
 and then considering post relationships. These steps would solve this for
 all custom taxonomies, not just menus, and would put us on a path to
 considering term meta and post relationships — which I imagine you would
 not like to slow down. :-)

 Those tickets are (in order, as each blocks the next) — #17689, #22023,
 #5809, and #21950. I've proposed tackling these for 3.9 (hinted
 [http://make.wordpress.org/core/2014/01/22/possible-tasks-for-wp-3-9/ in
 this post]), which will solve this problem.

 So, in the end, this is a non-starter for two reasons:
  * We're not going to re-architecting an entire schema to move to a
 serialized array, especially not to fix a deficiency in the custom
 taxonomy API.
  * We ''are'' planning to fix the custom taxonomy deficiency very soon,
 which will render the problem here moot and make custom taxonomies a
 better building block for others.

 So, yes, it's safe to close this — but it's also clear everyone wins.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/26946#comment:6>
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