How to determine if plugin is in use?

Hmm, interesting question ??

You could check on the admin pages for all the taxonomies, of the sort order is by ID. Sorting by ID is default and the plugin will do nothing in that case.
If there is a taxonomy where the sort order is set to Custom or Alphabetical, this plugin has been in use for that taxonomy, and might still be.

Some other questions about the frontend:
– Is there a widget at the frontend where terms are shown?
– The blogpages, do they have a custom order for tags and categories shown in the metadata of a post?
– Do you use WooCommerce (that is a whole thing by itself)?

In the end, you can just disable this plugin, it should mostly not be used directly. It will just remove any ordering that was applied.
I assume your customer doesn’t know if any order was applied?

You could check your code if the function ‘customtaxorder_sort_taxonomies’ is in use, that is the only function that is not used by a hook, but directly.

OK thanks for that. Here are my follow-ups.

>> You could check on the admin pages for all the taxonomies, of the sort order is by ID.

OK how would I check that? For example, I’ve opened the admin page for one of the ‘Categories’ taxonomy: Category 1 (screenshot). Are you saying that somewhere on this page should be some field indicating the sort order? I don’t see any such field. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place though?

>> – Is there a widget at the frontend where terms are shown?

There is a search form that displays terms–does that count?

>> The blogpages, do they have a custom order for tags and categories shown in the metadata of a post?

There are no blog posts at all.

>> Do you use WooCommerce (that is a whole thing by itself)?

No.

But the site has a particular custom post defined by my theme. These posts are displayed on a few pages (example). I’m not sure how the order is defined on those pages. How would I be able to check?

Ah, you can go to Dashboard > Term Order > Categories
That is where you can change the order. At the bottom are the radio buttons for the order that is used.
You can do that for the custom taxonomy as well.

Yes, that searchform might use a sortorder. Are they ordered by ID, or in another way? Can you see?

>> you can go to Dashboard > Term Order > Categories

In Dashboard–>Term Order, there is no ‘Categories’ option. The closest is ‘Order Categories,’ and that actually appears twice (screenshot).

>> Yes, that searchform might use a sortorder. Are they ordered by ID, or in another way? Can you see?

When using the search form, the default sort order appears to be by a particular meta key (‘featured_property’). In other words, the posts marked as ‘Featured Property’ are displayed first. The search form also allows the user to change the sort order to other typical orders, e.g. least-expensive-to-most-expensive, newest-to-oldest, etc).

You seem to have many taxonomies ??
You want to check all the submenu items there, not just the 2 categories. Check if they order by ID. If they are set to order by ID you don’t need to worry about them.
The other ones are your concern, custom order and alphabetical.

This plugin does not sort posts, it sorts categories and custom terms. So don’t worry about posts or meta_keys of posts.

>> You want to check all the submenu items there, not just the 2 categories. Check if they order by ID. If they are set to order by ID you don’t need to worry about them.
The other ones are your concern, custom order and alphabetical.

OK I’ll check that.

>> This plugin does not sort posts, it sorts categories and custom terms. So don’t worry about posts or meta_keys of posts.

OK right, got it. So the order of my *posts* will be unaffected–I understand now.

I don’t understand why some items appear twice in Dashboard–>Term Order (e.g. ‘Order Categories’). Why is that?

They are different taxonomies. You can see it in the url of that page.
The next version has the taxonomy name listed as well, next to the more general label.

OK thanks. I determined the ‘Neighborhoods’ taxonomy was displayed in a custom order, in the search form. I confirmed this by opening Dashboard–>Term Order–>Neighborhoods and saw they were in a custom order, which was identical to the order in the search form. I then deactivated plugin, and search form order changed. So this means that the plugin is indeed in-use on my site, so I’ll leave it in place.

We can consider this resolved. Thanks for your help.