Title: Post Management Question / Request
Last modified: August 19, 2016

---

# Post Management Question / Request

 *  [gcaleval](https://wordpress.org/support/users/gcaleval/)
 * (@gcaleval)
 * [17 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/post-management-question-request/)
 * This is directed to 2.7 development/feature request, I think 🙂 If it is already
   there and I just can’t see, have pity.
 * With the proliferation of categories, tags, custom fields and what will come 
   next, there’s a chore that has to present itself more than just to me:
 * deleting all posts with a certain field value (eg. tag=”delete me”)
 * Not understanding the structure and relationships of the WP database, I thought
   I’d just run a straight delete query against the Posts table. But then of course
   I realized I’d left behind a whole lot of stuff in postmeta, term relationships
   and I honestly don’t know where else.
 * Would it be a big job to add a “query by example” Delete Posts function in the
   Manage Posts section that would allow the admin to select the field they want
   to use (“Tag,Category,Post Date) and an input box for the value to match on. 
   I’m thinking similar to PHPAdmin. The key with this feature would be the code
   would know about everything to delete, not just the records from the posts table.
 * I have also discovered some plugins that allow you to delete all posts created
   by them, actually only delete the posts table entries. And some plugins (RSS 
   feeds including the ones included with WP dashboard) write a bunch of content
   directly into the Options table. For some of them uninstalling or removing posts
   does not remove those Options table entries.
 * This all came to my attention because I have a two WP installs that I use to 
   experiment a lot with plugins and themes and trying to learn how to edit the 
   php files without blowing up the universe. One them used up its 100 Meg disk 
   quota from my host yet it had only a few thousand active posts. Almost the whole
   db was filled with left-overs from my excessive experiments. Of course in this
   case it is easy to simply empty the database and start from scratch, but I can’t
   imagine having to deal with it on a production install, even for a thousand posts.
   From what I can tell you would literally have to sit and delete each post individually
   to ensure it was properly cleaned up?
 * .g.

The topic ‘Post Management Question / Request’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [delete posts](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/delete-posts/)

 * In: [Requests and Feedback](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/requests-and-feedback/)
 * 0 replies
 * 1 participant
 * Last reply from: [gcaleval](https://wordpress.org/support/users/gcaleval/)
 * Last activity: [17 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/post-management-question-request/)
 * Status: not resolved

## Topics

### Topics with no replies

### Non-support topics

### Resolved topics

### Unresolved topics

### All topics
