How do you Properly Query Posts in a Multisite Network?

  • Resolved travelvice

    (@travelvice)


    13 years, 1 month ago

    Howdy, a brief multisite question for the brain trust:

    In a multisite environment, what’s the procedure for querying the posts of a site within a network (as opposed to a traditional config)?

    ***

    I’ve got a travelogue in a subdomain that I’m interested in folding into an MS install on the root.

    Off the root I’m going to be creating specific country & city Pages, with lists of travelogue entries (relevant to each Page’s city or country).

    Simply put, the Page domain.com/peru/lima/ would contain (amongst many other things) a list of all (not just recent) travelogue.domain.com entries from — yep, you guessed it — Lima, Peru.

    ‘Peru’ is a category and ‘Lima’ is the value of a custom field for that post.

    I will ultimately need to query, at the root level, posts in the travelogue that are within a certain category and contain a specific custom field. :p

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 17 total)
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  • Thread Starter travelvice

    (@travelvice)

    13 years, 1 month ago

    Perhaps simply using WPMU’s switch_to_blog would be appropriate, however very intensive when used across several hundred Pages.

    <?php switch_to_blog(2); ?>
// do stuff
<?php restore_current_blog(); ?>

    My guess is this would probably OK so long as W3 Total Cache stores this Page output to alleviate some of the burden.

    Andrea Rennick

    (@andrea_r)

    13 years, 1 month ago

    Gather all your posts into one blog with this plugin:

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-sitewide-tags/

    Thread Starter travelvice

    (@travelvice)

    13 years, 1 month ago

    Hi! Always lovely to have your thoughts.

    Alas, I was hoping to avoid leaning on that specific plugin to do this, but I can see that as of WP3.1 there’s still a lot of drama surrounding switch_to_blog and W3 Total Cache (#14992).

    Seems like it’s one or the other at this point.

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but it would appear that unless I’m using Sitewide Tags, there’s now little difference between folding the travelogue into a Multisite network or leaving it be on a single install. (as it pertains to pulling posts in a category with a custom field, that is)

    Andrea Rennick

    (@andrea_r)

    13 years, 1 month ago

    except wp super cache works just fine with SWT as they are from the same developer.

    SWT does what you want.

    that link about querying posts is for within one install – not for getting posts from a separate install into another one.

    Thread Starter travelvice

    (@travelvice)

    13 years, 1 month ago

    Right. It’s my understanding that WP Super Cache isn’t having the same conflicting problems with switch_to_blog that W3 Total Cache is. Or maybe it’s just going unreported. I don’t know.

    I certainly have no doubt that SWT is the answer for most folks, but I’m not supporting a large network, simply the root and one sub-site.

    However, as I’m on shared hosting, the bottom line on all this will be what ultimately consumes fewer server resources:
    1) using caching with SWT;
    2) using caching with switch_to_blog; or
    3) using caching with a custom select query

    Andrea Rennick

    (@andrea_r)

    13 years, 1 month ago

    1) using caching with SWT;

    this one.

    You only have TWO blogs.

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    🏳️‍🌈 Advisor and Activist

    13 years, 1 month ago

    Yeah, #2 wouldn’t work well anyway. Use Caching and SWT. Works fine 🙂

    Thread Starter travelvice

    (@travelvice)

    13 years, 1 month ago

    Thanks for your thoughts you two. Will have to look into if option #3 is just as speedy (cached), as my desire to not maintain/bloat with another plugin is high on my list. SWT seems to be the answer repeated again and again (for good reason), but I’m not one to shy away from the less traveled road.

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    🏳️‍🌈 Advisor and Activist

    13 years, 1 month ago

    I think querying multiple tables and merging the info will be more CPU intensive than just doing that with SWT personally (there’s a reason that’s currently the way we do it 😉 ) but I’m not the best with SQL queries.

    Thread Starter travelvice

    (@travelvice)

    13 years, 1 month ago

    FYI:
    This is just a follow-up for searchers who come across this topic.

    With the awesome help of Curtiss, there’s another option on the table for people to consider.

    I used this for Pages on site #1 where I wanted to pull and list Posts out of site #2.

    global $wpdb;
$wpdb->set_blog_id(2);
$wpdb->set_prefix($wpdb->base_prefix);

--- YOUR CODE ---

$wpdb->set_blog_id(1);
$wpdb->set_prefix( $wpdb->base_prefix );

    Detailed examples can be found here.

    Enjoy!

    Ron Rennick

    (@wpmuguru)

    13 years, 1 month ago

    I strongly recommend that you do not use the code snippet as an alternative to switch_to_blog().

    OffCourse2010

    (@offcourse2010)

    13 years, 1 month ago

    I am developing a network wordpress site and I would like to have all posts shown (and searcheable) in the main page.

    From what I have read in many forums, it allways comes back to SWT. However one can see that wordpress.com itself has this feature and they should be using an enhanced version of the wordpress script, I trust.

    How do they do it? No site would be bigger so they must have it fully dialed. It can’t be just hardcore servers running the core functions of wordpress, can it?

    Thanks

    Andrea Rennick

    (@andrea_r)

    13 years, 1 month ago

    They are using something similar to SWT.

    OffCourse2010

    (@offcourse2010)

    13 years, 1 month ago

    Someone suggested preparing a batch that would copy and update all posts from the subsites to the main site overnight.

    Is this similar to the SWT approach?

    Andrea Rennick

    (@andrea_r)

    13 years, 1 month ago

    Yes. that’s exactly what it does. Why reinvent the wheel?

    The guy who made the3 SWT plugin works for wp.com.

    The stuff on the front page of wp.com is actually hand selected, not pulled in automatically from all blogs. They have *millions*.

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 17 total)
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