Best/Correct way to add an option to a category

Question

I'm currently writing my first plugin, which will let the site admin/editor use a different image as a background/header for each post/page, and I would also like to have defaults for each category.

Here is where I'm not sure how to proceed: If for each post/page the image (which is an attachment, so is just an id in the db) is a simple post meta field, there is no such (implicit) thing for categories.

So there are more ways to go:

• Create an option for every category - something like background_cat_$id_
• Add the categories which correspond to a certain image to the attachment post ( corresponding_cats ? )
• Modify the term_taxonomy table to add a column (last resort? bad design?)

Right now I believe I'll go with my first option but I'm really curios how you handle such issues.

Answer 1

Best way would be to use this plugin:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-term-meta/

Answer 2

You can see the approach I use myself in my answer to this question

You're on the right track though. Until we have a taxonomy meta table then the options table is the tidiest solution. You could always create a taxonomy meta table yourself with the plugin though and make some get/set functions to go with it.