Jonny Harris
spacedmonkey.bsky.social
Jonny Harris
@spacedmonkey.bsky.social
WordPress core committer. Working on the Times. Lover of open source.
Cover block images are a special case. They should really use an image tag but they don’t. They use a div with background image as it gives more css control.
August 18, 2025 at 4:43 PM
Have you ever used the alias_of term functionality in WordPress?

Or even heard of it?
Genuinely curious — reply and let me know. 👇 #WordPress #DevSurprises
July 1, 2025 at 8:56 PM
Apparently it was officially deprecated in WordPress 4.7 — yet it still works if you manually set it.

I can’t believe this was quietly lurking in plain sight all this time.
July 1, 2025 at 8:56 PM
It doesn’t show up in the admin UI.
There’s no core UI for managing aliases.
You have to dig into the DB or use code.
And it only works within the same taxonomy.
July 1, 2025 at 8:56 PM
You can even set alias_of via wp_insert_term() or when registering terms manually.

Internally, WordPress uses it to merge terms. Think of it as a soft-deprecated, under-documented feature from the multisite merge days.
July 1, 2025 at 8:56 PM
Turns out there’s a alias_of parameter for taxonomy terms.

It’s meant to point one term (e.g. a tag or category) to another — so when you access the alias, it loads the main term instead. Essentially a redirect, at the database level.
July 1, 2025 at 8:56 PM
I am not even in Europe right now, I am in Canada. I think that law of physics requires me to half a word away. Crazy. Hopefully next time!
June 8, 2025 at 1:34 PM
You went to WCEU?!? The one bloody WCEU I miss!
June 8, 2025 at 1:20 PM
It can be used with delicious brains background processing. I would look at using WP cli to run your scheduled tasks, once a minute using a real cron on your server.
June 2, 2025 at 7:54 PM
Have you looked into action scheduler?
June 2, 2025 at 7:13 AM