Taxonomy: unwanted pop-up menu

This is probably going to come down to a limitation of WordPress in general, because you’re using 400 custom taxonomies. There’s only so much space UI that can be accommodated for that. You’d most likely run into the exact same issue if you registered those all via code with your active theme’s functions.php file.

Not really anything we can do on our end, much like Toolset couldn’t either.

Michael Beckwith
It must be the drop-down then. But there are other tools that use UI presentation in similar format to WP Pages/Posts windows – which are also easier to navigate than the drop-down.
So it is a UI limitation. Our test site has 700+ categories, without a problem. Computerized systems in the 1980s used 1000+ Dewey classifications.
Pity then, as your plugin is great for many functions. You are forcing us now to look elsewhere.
Or is there perhaps not a quick fix to disable the drop-down, and play out the taxonomy data in a different format?

…
if the drop-down could be arranged with first level letters from the alphabet, and then second level lists the array by first letter:
A –> Alpha
etc
B –> Beta
etc

This isn’t anything that CPTUI is affecting, though. This would be all WordPress admin’s UI rendering with a very large list of items to try and show. Our specific code doesn’t influence the UI in any way, we handle the registration of the taxonomies for you, and that’s about it.

I would be surprised if you didn’t encounter the exact same issues with registering the same volume in a different way.

Admittedly, I’m wondering why you need so many taxonomies, and perhaps if there’s a better way to try and achieve what you’re trying. Perhaps a case of all of these taxonomies should actually be terms in a much smaller list of taxonomies. For example are these all being treated as a category? Which is technically its own taxonomy, and say the out of box “uncategorized” is a term in the “category taxonomy”.

There are many large taxonomies in the world. Medical, for example. And there are 249 different bird families with 2,057 genus and 11’000 species.

Yes, agreed and understanding the analogy. However “bird-family” can be the taxonomy, while the 2057 genus types could be the terms an species be a child term of the genus types. There’s hierarchy in this example vs what I’m interpreting as a flat structure being used thus far.

This gives one taxonomy to worry about at the WP admin menu level, and allows use of the term UI that is much more robust and ready for large volumes of data.

Michael Beckwith thanks for your reply.

Each of those actually have child classes. Think more along the lines of a library or encyclopedia. There are lost of top level classes and many more sub-classes. What appears to be flat is just the high-order level. So if, for example, the present 800+ high-order classes are grouped into 4 primary classes, each will have 200 on the 2nd level, which means there will be 796 second-order ones, still resulting in the UI problem.

Not at the UI level with the admin bar or the side menu of the WP admin.

That said, there’s nothing that we can do at the plugin level here to address this, as we don’t control any aspect of it. This is how WordPress handles top level taxonomies with regards to menus, and it just happens to be that there are a TON that it’s having to deal with here.