For a client we’ll need 29,000 terms (all the highschool’s in the US) and each term needs 6 meta items (address, phone…). My initial thought was to store the term meta information as suggested in this post but after looking through it again I will be using lots of terms and I wonder if it will overload the options table.
Is there a good time to create a new table? Would this qualify? Other thoughts on how to relate the HS that a person attends to the ‘post’ that will be their academic profile?
It was suggested that I make the ‘terms’ a Custom Post Type. I’m not opposed to that either but I fail to see how I’ll relate the CPT to multiple ‘authors’ since a school will have more than one student that attends it. Because of the multiple ownership of the content terms just seemed to fit better.
As the article mentions, using wp_options is not a good idea when you have thousands of terms, mainly because there’s:
In this particular case, yes, it’s appropriate to create some custom tables.
To save time, you can use this plugin (update more recently than Simple Term Meta):
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/taxonomy-metadata/
Having said that, it looks to me like a custom post type would be better suited for this.
Take a look at my Posts 2 Posts plugin for relating highschools to whatever you were planning on relating them to.