Join Our Campaign to Get WordPress to Support Custom Fields for Categories and Tags

One of WordPress’s great features is the ability to assign custom fields, also known as post meta-data, to a post or page.

We are campaigning for the WordPress development team to extend this feature by allowing you to create custom fields for any of your categories, tags or custom taxonomies. To help us, please vote for our feature on the WordPress Ideas Suggestion Page by going to the site below and clicking on 5 stars underneath the “Rate This” heading on the right-hand side:

http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/topic/custom-fields-meta-data-for-categories-and-tags-terms

Register for WordPress.org account if you don’t already have one – it will allow you to post on the discussion boards and provide feedback.

Here are some examples of useful ways you can use custom fields on categories or tags:

To display category images or tag images – This would allow you to display a specific banner image at the top of the page whenever a website visitor views a category or tag archive. The path to the image file could be stored in the category or tag custom field, which would be retrieved by a template tag in the theme.

Associating banner ads with category archive or tag pages – The banner ad code or configuration parameters could be stored in a custom field. This would also be retrieved and displayed by code within the theme.

Tracking the number of times that a category or tag archive page is viewed – This is similar to how custom fields are used by plugins like WP-PostViews, which track the number of times a post or page has been read.

At the moment, there is a plugin WP Category Meta that implements custom fields for terms, but it has not been updated to work with WordPress 3.2. The plugin creates an additional MySQL Database table for terms meta data, plus some PHP functions to update and access the terms meta. Their syntax is virtually identical to the ones used for post meta. This sort of functionality really belongs in the WordPress code base.