Aggregating Recent Posts to Parent Site in Multisite Install

Here’s the thread I started. Hopefully an expert will weigh in:

suicidal multisite database queries

I may end up using this theme using simplepie for a while until I can find a better way.

https://templatic.com/news/aggegator-all-your-feeds-at-your-website-front

Demo: https://templatic.com/demo/aggregator/

@raskull querying the db & caching is a whole lot less expensive than using rss to pull information from across the site. Not only that, the rss pull from within the same install is way less efficient. you’re going out to the internet and all the way back again, in addition to querying the site.

I rarely recommend using rss feeds internally. It can easily pull down your site.

The plugin above, and all the others I’ve seen, use the function get_blog_list, which has been deprecated for its “suicidal” tendencies.

And that’s why I said we had a new one on the way….

@marikamitsos had you looked at the sitewide tags plugin?
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-sitewide-tags/
It pulls full posts, so if you really wanted just headlines, use that on a tags blog, then pull the ONE rss feed to the main page on the main site.

Problem solved.

I don’t seem to be getting an answer to my questions though. What is the safe method for users with a lot of blogs?

I’m not asking for a plugin; I’m asking for the best method to achieve what I’m after. If it is not rss and it is not get_blog_list and it is not transients api… then what is it?

Is it a secret?

Lol, no.

It’s called a global table.

So something like this? https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/post-indexer

“This is one heck of a powerful plugin as it indexes all posts on your site into a global table that can be queried for lists of recent posts, etc…”

Yeah, that’s one way.

have a look at the sitewide tags plugin and see how it copies the data it needs.

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-sitewide-tags/

Andrea – when will your widget for this purpose be available?

when I get around to nagging Ron to write the release post & release it already. ??

it’s on the list – it’s just a loooong list.

It’s amazing that I didn’t need this functionality until about a week ago (when the OP was written), and Andrea promises imminent release of the very widget to ease my woes. I don’t want to nag, but I would like to add my voice to this thread in hopes of nudging the release forward.

Let me contribute with some code to solve this problem without any plugins. ??
Put this into latest_posts.php and, in functions.php in your theme folder add on top require(‘latest_posts.php’);

Hope this helps! ??

<?php
/*
Parameters
==========

$how_many (integer): how many recent posts are being displayed.
$how_long_days (integer): time frame to choose recent posts from (in days).
$how_many_words (integer): how many post's teaser are being displayed. Count by word. Default value are 50 words.
$remove_html (boolean): set true to remove any html tag within the post.
$sort_by (string - post_date/post_modified): You can short the lattest post by positing date (post_date) or posting update (post_modified).

Return
======

ID
post_url
post_title
post_content
author_url
author_name
post_date
post_time
comment_count
*/
function wpmu_latest_post($how_many = 10, $how_long_days = 30, $how_many_words = 50, $more_text = "[...]", $remove_html = true, $sort_by = 'post_date') {
	global $wpdb;

	//first, gat all blog id
	$query = "SELECT blog_id FROM $wpdb->blogs WHERE blog_id !='1'";
	$blogs = $wpdb->get_col($query);

	if ($blogs) {
		//we use blog id to loop post query
		foreach ($blogs as $blog) {
			$blogPostsTable = 'wp_'.$blog.'_posts';

			$db_query = "SELECT $blogPostsTable.ID,
						$blogPostsTable.post_author,
						$blogPostsTable.post_title,
						$blogPostsTable.guid,
						$blogPostsTable.post_date,
						$blogPostsTable.post_content,
						$blogPostsTable.post_modified,
						$blogPostsTable.comment_count
						FROM $blogPostsTable WHERE $blogPostsTable.post_status = 'publish'
						AND $blogPostsTable.post_date >= DATE_SUB(CURRENT_DATE(), INTERVAL $how_long_days DAY)
						AND $blogPostsTable.post_type = 'post'";

			$thispos = $wpdb->get_results($db_query);

			foreach($thispos as $thispost) {
				if($sort_by == 'post_date') {
					$order = $thispost->post_date;
				}
				else{
					$order = $thispost->post_modified;
				}

				$post_dates[]			= $order;
				$post_guids[$order]		= $thispost->guid;
				$blog_IDs[$order]		= $blog;
				$post_IDs[$order]		= $thispost->ID;
				$post_titles[$order]	= $thispost->post_title;
				$post_authors[$order]	= $thispost->post_author;
				$post_contents[$order]	= $thispost->post_content;
				$comments[$order]		= $thispost->comment_count;
			}
		}

		rsort($post_dates);
		$union_results	= array_unique($post_dates);
		$ResultArray	= array_slice($union_results, 0, $how_many);

		foreach ($ResultArray as $date) {
			$ID					= $post_IDs[$date];
			$id_author			= $post_authors[$date];
			$post_url			= get_blog_permalink($blog_IDs[$date], $ID);/*$post_guids[$date];*/
			$post_title			= $post_titles[$date];
			$post_content		= $post_contents[$date];
			$post_date			= mysql2date(get_option('date_format'), $date);
			$post_time			= mysql2date(get_option('time_format'), $date);
			$total_comment		= $comments[$date];
			$user_info			= get_userdata($id_author);
			$author_blog_url	= get_blogaddress_by_id($user_info->primary_blog);
			$author_url			= $user_info->user_url;
			$author_email		= $user_info->user_email;

			if($user_info->first_name) {
				$author_name = $user_info->first_name.' '.$user_info->last_name;
			}
			else{
				$author_name = $user_info->nickname;
			}

			if($remove_html) {
				$post_content = wpmu_cleanup_post($post_content);
			}

			$results = array();

			$results['ID']				= $ID;
			$results['post_url']		= $post_url;
			$results['post_title']		= $post_title;
			$results['post_content']	= wpmu_cut_article_by_words($post_content, $how_many_words);
			if ($results['post_content'] != $post_content)
				$results['post_content'] .= sprintf(' ?<a href="%s">%s</a>', $post_url, $more_text);
			$results['author_blog_url'] = $author_blog_url;
			$results['author_url'] 		= $author_url;
			$results['author_email']	= $author_email;
			$results['author_name'] 	= $author_name;
			$results['post_date']		= $post_date;
			$results['post_time']		= $post_time;
			$results['comment_count'] 	= $total_comment;

			$returns[] = $results;
		}

		$latest_posts = wpmu_bind_array_to_object($returns);
		return $latest_posts;
	}
}

function wpmu_bind_array_to_object($array) {
	$return = new stdClass();

	foreach ($array as $k => $v) {
		if (is_array($v)) {
			$return->$k = wpmu_bind_array_to_object($v);
		}
		else {
			$return->$k = $v;
		}
	}
	return $return;
}

function wpmu_cut_article_by_words($original_text, $how_many) {
	$word_cut = strtok($original_text," ");

	$return = '';

	for ($i=1;$i<=$how_many;$i++) {
		$return	.= $word_cut;
		$return	.= (" ");
		$word_cut = strtok(" ");
	}

	$return .= '';
	return $return;
}

function wpmu_cleanup_post($source) {
	$replace_all_html = strip_tags($source);
	$bbc_tag = array('/\[caption(.*?)]\[\/caption\]/is');
	$result = preg_replace($bbc_tag, '', $replace_all_html);

	return $result;
}
?>

@g0dlike – looks really cool! …now, if that was a plugin with some fields to control the parameters you define in how many, how long and how often… ??

@g0dlike Just to clarify what your instructions were

Put this into latest_posts.php and, in functions.php in your theme folder add on top require(‘latest_posts.php’);

YOu want us to

• Create a file called latest_post.php and past the code above into it
• Save the file as wp-content/themes/yourtheme/functions/latest_post.php/
• open wp-content/themes/yourtheme/functions.php and add require('latest_posts.php'); or in my case require_once ($functions_path . 'latest_posts.php'); // latestposts

I tried your code, first with the require as you had it and this is the error it gave:

Warning: main(latest_posts.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /nfs/c07/h03/mnt/103866/domains/mydomain.com/html/wp-content/themes/mytheme/functions.php on line 13

Warning: main(latest_posts.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /nfs/c07/h03/mnt/103866/domains/mydomain.com/html/wp-content/themes/mytheme/functions.php on line 13

Fatal error: main() [function.require]: Failed opening required 'latest_posts.php' (include_path='.:/usr/local/php-4.4.8-1/share/pear') in /nfs/c07/h03/mnt/103866/domains/mydomain.com/html/wp-content/themes/mytheme/functions.php on line 13

and when I tried it with the path corrected, I got this error

Warning: main(/nfs/c07/h03/mnt/103866/domains/mydomain.com/html/wp-content/themes/mytheme/functions/latest_posts.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /nfs/c07/h03/mnt/103866/domains/mydomain.com/html/wp-content/themes/mytheme/functions.php on line 21

Fatal error: main() [function.require]: Failed opening required '/nfs/c07/h03/mnt/103866/domains/mydomain.com/html/wp-content/themes/mytheme/functions/latest_posts.php' (include_path='.:/usr/local/php-4.4.8-1/share/pear') in /nfs/c07/h03/mnt/103866/domains/mydomain.com/html/wp-content/themes/mytheme/functions.php on line 21

If I messed up somewhere please clarify for me. And added info; i changed the names of my domain and theme for security reason but the errors are still the same.

@g0dlike

While I understand some of the code you posted, I’m a little lost in how you would go about using it. How do you display the posts that you queried from the different blogs? My php skills are minimal at best.

Thanks!

@phoat – just use the Sitewide tags plugin.

@godlike – “Let me contribute with some code to solve this problem without any plugins. :)”

If you;re adding code to functions.php… it’s still a plugin.