Basically I’m developing a yacht listing portfolio for our project. (Filtering of yacht types and sort them according to size, price, cabins, draft, build year, refit year etc.)
I created custom post types and their relevant custom fields etc. Now I have to decide between Querying by taxonomy or Querying by Custom fields for categorising yachts.
Custom fields are fitting almost all my needs and they are easy to maintain (all information coming from the same table), but I’m also looking for performance.
Now I have two options:
– First is filtering according to custom field value.
– Second is using custom taxonomies to get them (the entries) directly from the category.
Articles like Custom Fields vs. Taxonomies – Alex King state, When to (not) use a Custom Taxonomy – Otto that custom fields should not be used for filtering, because those values are not indexed.
But to order my query (size, price, cabins, draft, build year, refit year etc.) there is only one way to retrieve records which is an INNER JOIN. (As far as I know there is no other way. Is this is true?)
For this case (someone who already uses INNER JOIN) does it really matter to use taxonomies for categorising instead of filtering with the use of custom fields? (Because taxonomies are stored in another table and if I use them there will be another inner join.)
Are Custom fields still not indexed?
For something like you’re describing, you’re likely better off creating a separate table for your data with columns of a proper data type and indexes as appropriate.