SQL Error Unknown column ‘average_rating’

[Mohamed Salah]

Hello,

I am experiencing performance issues and server timeouts on my site due to a recurring database error triggered during ASP’s taxonomy term searches.

It is incorrectly injecting average_rating DESC into the ORDER BY clause of the taxonomy search query. Since tzp_terms does not have an average_rating column, the SQL query fails.

Here is the exact error from my debug.log:

Plaintext

WordPress database error Unknown column 'average_rating' in 'order clause' for query 
SELECT tzp_terms.name as `title`, tzp_terms.term_id as id, ...
FROM tzp_terms
LEFT JOIN tzp_term_taxonomy ON tzp_terms.term_id = tzp_term_taxonomy.term_id
WHERE ...
GROUP BY tzp_terms.term_id
ORDER BY average_rating DESC, date DESC, tzp_terms.name ASC
LIMIT 20000 made by ... WPDRMS\ASP\Search\SearchTaxonomyTerms->doSearch

example php_error:
[23-Jul-2026 14:15:44 UTC] WordPress database error Unknown column 'average_rating' in 'order clause' for query 
		SELECT
		  
		  
		  tzp_terms.name as `title`,
		  tzp_terms.term_id as id,
		  1 as `blogid`,
		  tzp_term_taxonomy.description as `content`,
		  '' as `date`,
		  '' as `author`,
		  tzp_term_taxonomy.taxonomy as taxonomy,
		  'term' as `content_type`,
		  'terms' as `g_content_type`,
		  ((case when
					(tzp_terms.name LIKE '%طقم%')
					 then 3 else 0 end) + (case when
				(tzp_terms.name LIKE 'طقم مسامير قاعدة تواليت%')
				 then 20 else 0 end) + (case when
				(tzp_terms.name LIKE '%طقم مسامير قاعدة تواليت%')
				 then 10 else 0 end)) as `relevance`
		FROM
		  tzp_terms
		  LEFT JOIN tzp_term_taxonomy ON tzp_terms.term_id = tzp_term_taxonomy.term_id
		  
		  
		  
		WHERE
			( tzp_term_taxonomy.taxonomy IN ('category','product_cat','product_brand') )
			AND ( (( tzp_terms.name LIKE '%طقم مسامير قاعدة تواليت%' )) OR (( tzp_terms.name LIKE '%طقم%' )) OR (( tzp_terms.name LIKE '%مسامير%' )) OR (( tzp_terms.name LIKE '%قاعدة%' )) OR (( tzp_terms.name LIKE '%تواليت%' )) OR (( tzp_terms.name LIKE '%مجموعة%' )) OR (( tzp_terms.name LIKE '%مجموعة كاملة%' )) OR (( tzp_terms.name LIKE '%طاقم%' )) OR (( tzp_terms.name LIKE '%سيت%' )) OR (( tzp_terms.name LIKE '%مسطرة%' )) OR (( tzp_terms.name LIKE '%سطح مستوي%' )) OR (( tzp_terms.name LIKE '%دعامة%' )) OR (( tzp_terms.name LIKE '%قاعدة تثبيت%' )) )
			
			 AND (tzp_term_taxonomy.count > 0) 
			AND (1)
			
			
			
		GROUP BY 
			tzp_terms.term_id
		 ORDER BY  average_rating DESC, date DESC, tzp_terms.name ASC
	LIMIT 20000 made by require('wp-blog-header.php'), wp, WP->main, WP->query_posts, WP_Query->query, WP_Query->get_posts, apply_filters_ref_array('posts_results'), WP_Hook->apply_filters, WPDRMS\ASP\Hooks\Filters\SearchOverride->override, WPDRMS\ASP\Query\SearchQuery->__construct, WPDRMS\ASP\Query\SearchQuery->get_posts, WPDRMS\ASP\Search\AbstractSearch->search, WPDRMS\ASP\Search\SearchTaxonomyTerms->doSearch

My Environment:

• WordPress: 7.0.2

• WooCommerce: 10.9.4

• Ajax Search Pro: 4.29.1

My primary ordering in ASP is set to Relevance, and the secondary ordering is set to Publish Date Descending. This error only occurs when returning taxonomy terms as results.

Could you please advise if there is a specific compatibility setting in ASP to strictly prevent other plugins from altering the SearchTaxonomyTerms queries? Alternatively, is there a PHP snippet I can add to explicitly strip average_rating from the term search order clause?

Thank you for your support

• This topic was modified 2 hours, 48 minutes ago by Mohamed Salah.

[Ernest Marcinko]

Hi,

That seems to be an injected query argument throug the asp_query args hook, as there are only 2 orderings. It is likely injected through the asp_query_args hook from what I can tell. That’s not something you can prevent, but you should be able to override through a snippet:

add_filter(
	'asp_query_args',
	function ( $args ) {
		if ( isset($args['term_query']['orderby']) ) {
			$args['term_query']['orderby'] = '';
		}
		return $args;
	}, PHP_INT_MAX, 1
);

PS: We just released a code snippets plugin called SnipCraft – the free version has more features than anything on the market, feel free to try it 🙂

All the best,
Ernest

[Author]

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