You mean for the individual posts? In this example, all posts in the ‘Red’ term are marked as ‘Red’ but not as ‘Meat’. I’m sure adding them as ‘Meat’ as well would fix the ordering but as the displayed counts seem to include children, I’d have thought it should be possible to include the children in the ordering too. Forcing the user to add all parent terms whenever they add a child term is not really an option, partly because I can’t guarantee all users will follow this rule and partly because it wouldn’t always make sense.

Here’s an example:

If I’m running a shop website and I label my products with taxonomies, it’s logical to expect that if an item is tagged as ‘red meat’, it should also be tagged as ‘meat’.

However, if I want to tag customers with their interests, someone (let’s say Bob) who is interested in ‘red meat’ may not be at all interested in ‘meat’ in general. Bob’s interest is specific so he would need to be tagged just with ‘red meat’ and not ‘meat’. If I then filtered my customers by ‘meat’, with the ‘Include Children in Parents’ flag switched on, I’d expect to see Bob included in the count in brackets (which currently is working) but I’d also expect ‘meat’ to be in the correct order when the terms are ordered by count.

Essentially, when terms are ordered by count, this should be impossible:

> Fruits (12)
> Vegetables(6)
> Meats(15)
> Red meat (5)
> White meat (5)

‘Meats’ should be at the top, even though only 5 posts are directly tagged as ‘meat’, because when you include posts tagged as its children, the count is 15 (as it says correctly in the label).