get_terms ignores orderby argument on WooCommerce product categories

Question

I used the following function for listing product categories and order them by name. Since I last updated WooCommerce from 3.5.7 to 3.6.1 and this is not working any more.

It does not matter, what I write into orderby. The terms are ordered by id I guess, in the same order as in the backend.

I had this problem before, but then I added 'menu_order' => false and it worked. But since the update nothing works any more.

$terms = get_terms( 'product_cat', array(
       'orderby'           => 'name', 
       'order'             => 'ASC',
       'parent' => 2063,
       'menu_order' => false,
       'suppress_filter' => false
   ) );

I Also tried to switch themes without success. Any help is welcome.

I use WordPress version 5.1.1 and Storefront theme version 2.4.5.

Answer 1

Update 2 - Solved

After I reported this issue on Github WooCommerce, it was clearly a bug affecting orderby argument when calling get_terms() function. It's now approved and patched.

The issue is solved on Woocommerce update 3.6.2

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First since WordPress 4.5 taxonomies should be passed via the ‘taxonomy’ argument in the argument array on get_terms() function.

You can not use 'menu_order' and 'suppress_filter' arguments, as they are not defined for WP_Term_Query Class. Instead of 'menu_order', you will use 'orderby' => 'order',.

---

Now the allowed arguments for WordPress get_terms() function are listed in WP_Term_Query __construct().

So YES you can use "orderby" argument:

• The defaults value is set to name.
• Accepts term fields (name, slug, term_group, term_id, id, description, parent), count for term taxonomy count, include to match the order of the $include param, slug__in to match the order of the $slug param, meta_value, meta_value_num, the value of $meta_key , the array keys of $meta_query, or none to omit the ORDER BY clause.

So your code should be something like:

$terms = get_terms( array(
    'taxonomy' => 'product_cat',
    // 'orderby'  => 'name', // <=== Default orderby is already 'name'
    'order'    => 'ASC',
    'parent'   => 2063,
) );

Tested and