Common WordPress caveats

This is an article which I will edit in the future with other common WordPress caveats so feel free to send suggestions.

Child_of vs parent in get_terms

Although this makes sense immediately after you read the documentation I ran into this issue. When getting custom taxonomy terms with the “get_terms” function you can use as argument either “child_of” or “parent”. The main difference between the two being that if the taxonomy is hierarchical ( like “Categories” ) using “parent” you will only get first descendants of that term. Using “child_of” you will get all the children and this can cause duplicate results. This is most likely to happen in a “related terms” situation.

tax_query array of arrays

It might be obvious to everybody by now but if you ever go crazy why tax_query or meta_query in a WP_Query isn’t working it could be that the format is wrong. So be careful to use an array of arrays, like this:

$args = array(
    'meta_query' => array(
        array(
            'key' => 'color',
            'value' => 'red'
        )
    )
);

Multisite max_upload_file_size

Creating a WordPress multi-site network you might encounter an issue with file uploads after the setup. Before going crazy changing all the php.ini settings and wp-config.php with no result make sure you check the value of “max_upload_file_size” in the network settings page.

That’s /wp-admin/network/settings.php in case you don’t know where to find it. Also note that it’s a value in kb – so don’t set it to something like 64.