TL;DR: I’m trying to get the meta_value display_type for a taxonomy, but it returns blank (even though I can see it in the database).

This question wants to access a term meta that is on a the taxonomy: product_cat, which is a taxonomy made by WooCommerce.

I’m asking this here instead of StackOverflow, since it’s more related to WordPress than to WooCommerce.

In my database, I can see that there are a couple of lines in the database for the term with the $term->ID = 15.

meta_id    |  term_id  |  meta_key       |  meta-value
---------------------------------------------------
1          |  15       |  display_type   |  subcategories
2          |  15       |  thumbnail_id   |  0
204        |  15       |  product_....   |  45
676        |  15       |  an_acf_field   |  test
676        |  15       |  _an_acf_field  |  field_123abc123abc

But for some reason then this returns empty:

$term = get_queried_object(); // in the file taxonomy-product-cat.php
$display_type = get_term_meta( $term->ID, 'display_type' ); // $term->ID = 15
echo '<pre>';
print_r($display_type);
echo '</pre>';
// Returns empty

So I figured that I could debug it, by getting all term_meta for that ID (15). But I can’t find any WordPress-function that get’s all the meta_fields?

Solution attempts

Attempt 1 – Using WPDB

I could do something like this:

global $wpdb;
$test = $wpdb->get_results( "SELECT * FROM wp_termmeta WHERE term_id = '15'");

But it just seems like a non-WordPress-kinda-way.

Attempt 2 – get_term_meta without key

A wild guess was to just do this:

$term = get_queried_object(); 
$display_type = get_term_meta( $term->ID ); // !! No key defined
echo '<pre>';
print_r($display_type);
echo '</pre>';
// Still returns empty

Attempt 3 – Looking into WooCommerce documentation

I can see that WooCommerce access the display_type itself here

like this:

$display_type = get_term_meta( $item->term_id, 'display_type', true );

… So it baffles me that it doesn’t work for me.