Organizational models

Terms are individual objects within a taxonomy. For example, the category taxonomy can have many categories (i.e., terms).

Meta (short for “metadata”) is simply additional data that can be tied to an object. This data can pretty much be anything.

Term meta, therefore, is additional data about specific taxonomy terms.

WordPress has long allowed for meta on other types of objects, such as:

• Posts
• Comments
• Users

If you’ve used WordPress, you’ve used metadata in some way, even if you didn’t know it. Metadata is actually pretty important because it allows plugins (and even core itself) to add extra data to the various objects that’s not accounted for in the main table.

A good example of this is featured images in core. Core stores the image ID as metadata because there’s no field for the image ID in the posts table. So, metadata to the rescue!