This plugin is heavily inspired by previous work by Justin Tadlock in explaining how WordPress actually support taxonomies for users and what additional code needs to be added to support this.

On the back of that Damian Gostomski wrote a plugin and added it too the repository to add said functionality. However the plugin was incomplete and development has stopped. As I am using this sort of functionality in the LocalHero project I have fixed some bugs in the original code and also added some new functionality so that when you use register_taxonomy to register a taxonomy for users you have almost as much control as if he taxonomy was for posts.

After numerous unsuccessful attempts to contact the plugin author to incorporate my enhancements I have forked the original plugin.

Fixes and enhancements to the original plugin include:

  • Fixes a bug with display of existing user taxonomies in the user-edit screen
  • Fixes a bug with taxonomy count in the old plugin where deleting users did not update the count
  • Add support for ‘single_value’ attribute when registering a user taxonomy for taxonomies which should only have one value.
  • Properly supports the capabilities associated with the taxonomy when registered.
  • Supports ‘show_admin_column’ attribute when registering the taxonomy in the same way as post taxonomies.
  • When ‘show_admin_column’ is set to true admins can bulk edit the user taxonomy.

Going forward  will further enhance this plugin to incorporate the ‘hierarchical’ attribute used in registration when assigning a user taxonomy.

Questions

How do I get a user taxonomy to act like a category
Answer: By default user taxonomies are non hierarchical but if you need them to to have parent and child functionality then set ‘hierarchical’ => true, when regiustering and be sure to remove the single value restriction.

How do I get a user taxonomy to act like a post tag.
Answer: It does not support free form entry yet but i future releases this is planned.

If you like this plugin please consider making a donation to further development