After you’ve worked with WordPress for any extended amount of time, it’s likely that you’ve worked with post metadata in some capacity. Perhaps you’ve simply read metadata from the database, or maybe you’ve both written to and read from the database table, as well.

It can be a really powerful API whenever you need to associate certain information with your posts (or, if you’re into abstracting things even more, to your models).

That said, what happens when you want to include information from the metadata table but don’t have the convenience of plugins such as SearchWP or Relevanssi?

Furthermore, assume the use case is just for administrators and it’s only for the administration area of WordPress. That is, you want to search your posts from within the All Posts screen but you want to include the post metadata in the search criteria, as well.

What then?

One of the things I’ve been considering for a while now (read: most of this year) is archiving my GitHub repositories and retiring what WordPress plugins I currently have available.

Last month, I spent time thinking about why I’d want to do so versus just letting them sit. Though there are multiple reasons for doing so, there’s one reason to which I kept returning (and plenty of others I’ll outline in moment).

But first, the TL;DR is this: There’s a single side project I want to work on without any distractions.

That’s it. Nothing elaborate, fancy, or groundbreaking. The thing about having a variety of other repositories available, though, is that there are occasional emails about bugs, feature requests, etc., all of which are appreciated but most of which I don’t have time on which to focus at the moment.

Instead, I think my time can be better spent on other work. And I think I want to spend my time on other things.