What Happens if I Disable Global Terms?

  • I have global terms enabled. It’s enabled because I installed WordPress Multisite a really long time ago and it was enabled by default back then. None of the updates will change it. See: https://core.trac.www.ads-software.com/ticket/12589

    I verified global_terms_enabled is set to 1 in wp_sitemeta and the wp_sitecategories table exists.

    Is there any downsides or problems to manually disabling global terms now? Having it enabled causes issues where the site admins cannot edit or delete categories.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    I didn’t even know that was a thing. I would expect any sites that use global terms would likely lose any such term assignments to posts. If term relationship references remain which fail to lead to related global terms, it would be inefficient but I don’t think it would cause errors. Term queries will just fail to return anything. You could make a full DB backup, then disable global terms and see what happens. If bad things result, restore from backup. If that seems too risky, clone the site somewhere and experiment on the clone.

    Thread Starter dcarrol2

    (@dcarrol2)

    I was kind of thinking that was what I had to do, just disable it and see what happens. Global terms appears to be an abandoned feature. The documentation for it is very sparse and doesn’t really describe what it does in detail.

    On this page, https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference/global_terms, it says that terms are “synced”, which imply they exist in multiple tables (at least categories do – I verified the same term appears in a site’s terms and sitecategories).

    One might assume that disabling global terms would mean that the site would continue working just fine using the date in each site’s terms table. Of course, you wouldn’t be able to re-enable global terms since the tables would drift out of sync over time.

    Of course, that’s just an assumption. And you are right about there maybe being some term relationship references to the global terms. I don’t think so, but I didn’t even know global terms were enabled until they started causing problems.

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    I looked a little further into this. You are correct, global term data occurs in each site’s terms table. I wouldn’t expect any ill effects from disabling global terms other than sync will of course cease. Please backup all the same ??

    I’m still unclear how global terms really work internally other than that calling the function you referenced syncs the passed term with sitecategories and returns a global term ID to be used. I think you can even re-enable global terms, with the caveat that any terms added in the interim will not be global until global_terms() is called for that term.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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