Inherit

What is the Inherit Status in WordPress?

In another post, we wrote about the 8 default statuses in WordPress. These statuses control who can view your WordPress content.

Six of these post statuses are easily visible. That leaves only two statuses that are harder to see in WordPress: Auto-Draft and Inherit. In this tutorial, I’m going to explain the Inherit status.

If you browse the wp_posts table in your database, you may see hundreds or thousands of items with the “inherit” status. You can see examples in the screenshot below. These items are likely to be either Attachments or Revisions.

Why do these post types use the “Inherit” status so much? This is because both Attachments and Revisions are child items that are tightly linked to parent posts.

Attachments are files uploaded to the Media Library when you're writing a post. Afterwards, they are “attached” to that particular post. So if you publish a post with an image, it makes perfect sense for both the post and the attachment to have the same status. WordPress uses the “inherit” status to make sure they share that same status.

Revisions are inextricably linked to a single post so it also makes sense for them to share the same status.

You will almost never see the “inherit” status in the WordPress admin area, but it's a very useful status that helps keep your site running smoothly.