update_term_meta not working

Question

I am trying to remove a string off of a bunch of slugs in terms from a CPT taxonomy.

For example, I have a term named "Accounting" but the slug has the "accounting-expert-witnesses" I just need to remove the "-expert-witnesses" part of the slug.

I am using this post as a reference as it appears to be what am I looking for but I cannot seem to get any of the suggestions to work: How to update taxonomy custom field with wp_update_term()?

I have tried using update_term_meta, update_post_meta, wp_update_term and none of them are doing what I need.

The closest I've got is using update_term_meta and it appears to be working when I error log the result however when I look at the terms in the dashboard nothing has been updated.

I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong here?

    function remove_stuff() {
    $terms = get_terms( array(
        'taxonomy' => 'experts_industries',
        'hide_empty' => false,
    ) );

    foreach($terms as $term) {

        $newSlug = str_replace('-expert-witnesses', '' , $term->slug);

        //update_term_meta($term->id, 'slug', $newSlug);

        //update_post_meta($term->id, 'slug', $newSlug); 

        wp_update_term($term->id, 'experts_industries', array( 'slug' => $newSlug ));

        error_log($term->slug);

    }
}
add_action( 'wp_loaded', 'remove_stuff' );

Answer 1

A terms slug is not stored as meta/custom fields, and it's definitely not post meta, so update_term_meta and update_post_meta are innapropriate and can never be used to achieve your goal.

The correct function is wp_update_term, however you've used that incorrectly too:

• $term->id isn't a thing, if we look at the WP_Term class and the examples on the official docs, we see $term->term_id is what should be used
• there is no code checking the return value of wp_update_term, if it failed there would have been a WP_Error object with an error message explaining what happened.
• error_log($term->slug); doesn't fetch the new slug from the database or make a new query to check for a new slug, this cannot be used to test if it worked. You need to check the return value of wp_update_term instead

From the official dev docs:

Return

(array|WP_Error) An array containing the term_id and term_taxonomy_id, WP_Error otherwise.

More examples and information at:

• https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/wp_update_term/
• https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/classes/wp_term/