WP Travel Addons

By Nyuchi Web Services. Version 1.0.0.

What it is

WP Travel Addons extends WP Travel (wptravel.io, by WEN Solutions) with four things that plugin does not provide: a REST-accessible trip schema, publication state for taxonomy terms, classification diagnostics, and compatibility guards for known defects in WP Travel companion plugins.

What it is not

This is not an addon for WP Travel Engine. WP Travel Engine is a different plugin by a different vendor with a different meta schema, and none of the meta keys this plugin reads and writes exist there. Installing this alongside WP Travel Engine will do nothing useful. This is the single most common confusion about the two products, so check which one the site actually runs before going further.

The trip post type is itineraries, and every trip meta key begins wp_travel_. If the site's trips live in a post type called trip and their meta keys begin wte_, the site is running WP Travel Engine and this plugin is the wrong tool.

Requirements

WordPress 5.9 or later, PHP 7.4 or later, and an active WP Travel installation. Each module checks that the trip post type exists before registering anything, so the plugin stays inert rather than erroring if WP Travel is deactivated.

The term publication state module hooks wpseo_robots_array, which is a Yoast SEO filter. Without Yoast that particular safety net is absent; the 404 on draft term archives still applies.

The four modules

Each module is switchable independently through the option wta_module_<key>, which defaults to on. The point of the plugin is to sit alongside someone else's product without becoming load-bearing in ways that are hard to back out of, so any single module can be turned off without disturbing the others.

Key	Module	What it does
trip_meta	Trip REST schema	Exposes WP Travel trip fields and the day-by-day itinerary through the REST API.
term_status	Term publication state	Adds live/draft status to taxonomy terms so a term can exist before it is public.
audit	Classification diagnostics	Reports flat hierarchies, empty terms, non-segmenting terms and cross-taxonomy duplicates.
compat	Compatibility guards	Works around known defects in WP Travel companion plugins.

Two further components are always loaded: a REST module and an admin module. Both read module state rather than adding behaviour of their own.

Post type and taxonomy names are held in one place, WTA_Trip, so an upstream schema change is a one-file edit rather than a hunt:

Name	Slug	Filter
Trips	itineraries	wta_trip_post_type
Destinations	travel_locations	wta_trip_taxonomies
Activities	activity	wta_trip_taxonomies
Trip Types	itinerary_types	wta_trip_taxonomies
Keywords	travel_keywords	wta_trip_taxonomies

The trip REST schema

WP Travel stores trip data in a mix of plain meta, protected meta and one PHP-serialised array, and registers none of it for REST. The whole trip catalogue is therefore out of reach of API clients out of the box.

Calling register_post_meta() with show_in_rest is not enough on its own. WP_REST_Posts_Controller only adds the meta object to a resource when the post type declares support for custom-fields, and WP Travel registers itineraries without it. Every meta registration is silently inert until that support exists — the meta is registered, but never appears in the response. The module therefore calls add_post_type_support() on init at priority 20: after WP Travel has registered the post type, and before REST builds its schema on rest_api_init.

Fields are registered in three groups, sanitised according to what they hold.

Scalars, sanitised with sanitize_text_field:

wp_travel_trip_price
wp_travel_trip_duration
wp_travel_trip_duration_night
wp_travel_group_size
wp_travel_trip_code
wp_travel_location
wp_travel_lat
wp_travel_lng
wp_travel_fixed_departure
wp_travel_trip_map_use_lat_lng

Rich text, sanitised with wp_kses_post so the markup the theme renders survives:

wp_travel_overview
wp_travel_outline
wp_travel_trip_include
wp_travel_trip_exclude

Protected Yoast SEO keys, writable only by a user who can edit the trip:

_yoast_wpseo_title
_yoast_wpseo_metadesc
_yoast_wpseo_focuskw
_yoast_wpseo_primary_travel_locations
_yoast_wpseo_primary_activity
_yoast_wpseo_primary_itinerary_types

Warning. Protected meta with show_in_rest enabled is returned to any reader, authenticated or not. The auth_callback gates writes, not reads. Only keys whose values are already public in the page source are exposed here. Adding your own keys through wta_trip_meta_fields means publishing them, so do not add anything you would not print in the page.

The itinerary field

The day-by-day itinerary is stored PHP-serialised in wp_travel_trip_itinerary_data. Exposing that through register_post_meta() would hand clients a raw serialised string, and a malformed write would corrupt the trip. It is exposed instead as a proper JSON array field, itinerary_days, registered with register_rest_field():

{
  "itinerary_days": [
    {
      "label": "Day 1",
      "title": "Arrival in Harare",
      "desc": "<p>Transfer to the lodge.</p>",
      "date": "",
      "time": ""
    }
  ]
}

Reads normalise every day block to those five string keys, so a client never has to defend against missing ones. Writes require edit_post on the trip, reject anything that is not an array with HTTP 400, sanitise label, title, date and time as plain text and desc as post HTML, and fall back to Day N when a block arrives without a label.

Duration is stored twice

WP Travel writes trip duration as two scalars, wp_travel_trip_duration and wp_travel_trip_duration_night, and again as a serialised mirror in wp_travel_trip_duration_formating. The mirror is what the front end actually renders. Writing only the scalars leaves the trip meta strip showing stale values, so the module watches added_post_meta and updated_post_meta for either scalar and rewrites the mirror from both.

Term publication state

WordPress has no draft state for terms. A term exists and is public the moment it is created, which makes it impossible to build a destination tree out ahead of the content: every empty term is immediately a thin, indexable archive.

This module adds live/draft to terms in the configured taxonomies, stored in term meta under _wta_status. Live is stored as the absence of the flag, so a term with no stored status is treated as live and the module changes nothing until someone deliberately drafts something.

A draft term stays fully editable and assignable in wp-admin. What changes is what the public sees:

• It is excluded from get_terms() results, which covers menus, widgets, filter dropdowns, term clouds and the REST terms endpoints.
• Its archive returns 404 through template_redirect.
• It is marked noindex, nofollow via wpseo_robots_array, in case something else serves the archive before template_redirect can 404 it.

Suppression applies only to requests from users who cannot edit_posts, and never inside wp-admin outside AJAX. An editor building the tree keeps seeing drafts and can preview them; visitors, anonymous REST consumers and search engines do not.

The term edit screens gain a Publication state select, and the term list tables gain a State column immediately after the name. Saving the field requires manage_categories. The taxonomies covered are held in the option wta_status_taxonomies, which is seeded on activation from the four WP Travel taxonomies.

Classification diagnostics

The audit module reports on the shape of the trip taxonomies rather than changing them: flat hierarchies, empty terms, terms that do not segment the catalogue, and terms duplicated across taxonomies. It is read-only advice about where the classification has drifted.

The compatibility guard

The compat module works around known defects in WP Travel companion plugins. It is switchable like the others, so a workaround can be dropped as soon as the upstream fix lands.

REST API reference

The plugin extends the core REST endpoints for the trip post type and its taxonomies rather than introducing a parallel API.

Method	Route	Purpose
GET	/wp-json/wp/v2/itineraries	Trip collection, each item carrying meta and itinerary_days.
GET	/wp-json/wp/v2/itineraries/<id>	Single trip.
POST	/wp-json/wp/v2/itineraries/<id>	Write trip meta and itinerary_days. Requires edit_post.
GET	/wp-json/wp/v2/travel_locations	Destination terms, each carrying wta_status. Drafts are omitted for unauthenticated callers.
POST	/wp-json/wp/v2/travel_locations/<id>	Write wta_status. Requires manage_categories.

The same term routes apply to activity, itinerary_types and travel_keywords, wherever WP Travel exposes the taxonomy in REST.

Fields added to those resources:

Field	Resource	Type	Notes
meta	trip	object	Present only because the module adds custom-fields support.
itinerary_days	trip	array of objects	label, title, desc, date, time.
wta_status	term	string	live or draft.

Error responses raised by the plugin:

Code	Status	Cause
wta_forbidden	403	Caller lacks edit_post on the trip, or manage_categories for a term state change.
wta_bad_format	400	itinerary_days was not an array.
wta_bad_status	400	wta_status was neither live nor draft.

Reading a trip:

curl -s "https://example.com/wp-json/wp/v2/itineraries/123?_fields=id,title,meta,itinerary_days"

Writing the itinerary:

curl -s -X POST "https://example.com/wp-json/wp/v2/itineraries/123" \
  -u "user:application-password" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"itinerary_days":[{"label":"Day 1","title":"Arrival"}]}'

Drafting a term:

curl -s -X POST "https://example.com/wp-json/wp/v2/travel_locations/45" \
  -u "user:application-password" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"wta_status":"draft"}'

Filters

Filter	Returns	Purpose
wta_trip_post_type	string	The trip post type slug. Default itineraries. The slug has differed between WP Travel versions.
wta_trip_taxonomies	array	Taxonomy slug to human label. Drives both term publication state and the audit.
wta_trip_meta_fields	array	The text, html and protected field groups registered for REST.

Adding a key to wta_trip_meta_fields publishes it. See the warning above.

Options the plugin owns:

Option	Purpose
wta_module_trip_meta, wta_module_term_status, wta_module_audit, wta_module_compat	Per-module switches, seeded to 1 on activation.
wta_status_taxonomies	Taxonomies that carry publication state.
wta_version	Installed version.

Installation

Copy the plugin directory to wp-content/plugins/wp-travel-addons and activate it from the Plugins screen, or install the zip through Plugins, Add New, Upload Plugin.

Activation seeds the four module options to on, seeds wta_status_taxonomies from the WP Travel taxonomy list, records the version, and flushes rewrite rules. The flush is necessary because term publication state changes what is publicly queryable.

Activate WP Travel first. The plugin loads on plugins_loaded at priority 20 and every module checks that the trip post type exists before registering anything, but leaving WP Travel inactive simply means nothing happens.

Licence

GPL v2 or later.