I wanted a simple method for displaying the most recent posts from all/any blog in WPMU in any page on my website.
Having looked around here it seems that you can easily display the most recent post from one or more blogs but what if one blog contains 2 (or more) of the most recent 10 posts? Also, most solutions here rely on the fact that WPMU is running in the background and therefore plugins etc. can be used.
My solution solves both these problems. It is independent of WPMU (except for accessing the database) and it will display the most recent x (user configurable) posts in a simple html format including links to the original articles, author name and how long ago the post was made.
Now I'm not a PHP/MySQL expert but the following code works well for me. If anyone would like to suggest improvements, either in code or functionality, I'd be very grateful.
<?php
$show = 10; # The number of posts to display on this page
$characters = 500; # The maximum number of characters to display from each post
$user = "db_user"; # The database user name
$password = "db_user_password"; # The database user password
$db = "db_name"; # The name of your WPMU database
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>My WPMU Blogs | Most recent posts</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Most recent posts</h1>
<?php
# connect to mysql and test the connection
$link = mysql_connect("localhost", $user, $password);
if (!$link) die ("cannot connect to mysql - check ID and Password");
# select the database once connected
mysql_select_db($db, $link) or die ("cannot select the database - check Name");
# get an array containing all blog ids and count how many there are
$query="SELECT blog_id FROM wp_blogs";
$result=mysql_query($query);
$count=mysql_num_rows($result);
# compile a query for all posts from all blogs and order with most recent first
$i=0;
while ($row=mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
$i++;
$blog_id=$row[blog_id];
if ($i < $count) {
$post_query .= "SELECT post_date, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(post_date) AS date, post_title, guid, post_content, post_author, display_name FROM wp_".$blog_id."_posts LEFT JOIN wp_users ON wp_".$blog_id."_posts.post_author = wp_users.ID WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_type = 'post' UNION ALL ";
}else{
$post_query .= "SELECT post_date, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(post_date) AS date, post_title, guid, post_content, post_author, display_name FROM wp_".$blog_id."_posts LEFT JOIN wp_users ON wp_".$blog_id."_posts.post_author = wp_users.ID WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_type = 'post' ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT $show;";
}
}
# run the query
$post_result=mysql_query($post_query);
# process and format each post from the query result
while ($post_row=mysql_fetch_array($post_result)) {
# process post title and link
$post_title=$post_row[post_title];
$post_url=$post_row[guid];
# process post content: remove images and captions, remove leading line breaks and returns, truncate, remove last character if it's a space and add a "more" link, replace breaks and returns with html paragraphs
$post_content=strip_tags($post_row[post_content]);
$post_content=preg_replace("/\[caption(.+?)\]/", "", $post_content);
$post_content=str_replace("[/caption]", "", $post_content);
while (substr($post_content, 0, 1) == chr(13) OR substr($post_content, 0, 1) == chr(10)){$post_content = substr($post_content, 1);}
if (strlen($post_content) > $characters) {
$post_content=substr($post_content, 0, $characters);
if (substr($post_content, -1, 1) == " "){$post_content = substr($post_content, 0, ($characters -1));}
$post_content=$post_content . "… <a href=\"$post_url\">more</a>";
}
$post_content=str_replace(chr(13).chr(10).chr(13).chr(10), "</p>\n<p>", $post_content);
# process time: determine how long ago the post was made and format accordingly
$post_date=$post_row[date];
$period=time()-$post_date;
if ($period <3600){
$period=floor($period/60);
if ($period==0){$period="Posted: less than one minute ago";}
elseif($period==1){$period="Posted: $period minute ago";}
else{$period="Posted: $period minutes ago";}
}
elseif ($period <86400)
{
$period=floor($period/3600);
if ($period==1){$period="Posted: $period hour ago";}else{$period="Posted: $period hours ago";}
}
else
{
$period=floor($period/86400);
if ($period==1){$period="Posted: $period day ago";}else{$period="Posted: $period days ago";}
}
$display_name=$post_row[display_name];
# output html
echo "<h2><a href=\"$post_url\">$post_title</a></h2>\n<p>$period by $display_name</p>\n<p>$post_content</p>\n\n";
}
# close the sql connection
mysql_close($link);
?>
</body>
</html>
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