When is it appropriate to create a new table in the WordPress database?

As the article mentions, using wp_options is not a good idea when you have thousands of terms, mainly because there’s:

  • a lot of serialization involved OR
  • long option names (the limit is 64 characters)

In this particular case, yes, it’s appropriate to create some custom tables.

To save time, you can use this plugin (update more recently than Simple Term Meta):

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/taxonomy-metadata/

Having said that, it looks to me like a custom post type would be better suited for this.

Take a look at my Posts 2 Posts plugin for relating highschools to whatever you were planning on relating them to.

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