Count Of Posts in Given Category With Specific Custom Meta

<?php 

$categories = get_categories( $args );
$counter = 0;

foreach($categories as $post){
   setup_postdata($post);
   $meta_query = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'name_of_meta_tag', true);
   if($meta_query){
      if($meta_query == "whatever"){
         $counter++;
      }
   }
}

echo $counter;
?>

Hi jimmyt1988,

thanks very much for getting back to me. I’m no expert on how WordPress and MySQL works, but this seems intuitively to be massive overkill, in terms of data throughput, when I don’t need any of the post content at all- literally just the number of posts in each category with a particular meta field. Maybe this is the only way to do it though…

a|x

You can directly query the database to get the count you want, the query will be rather complex because you need to do a few joins to access the table which holds category info.

toneburst… sorry about that. I was flicking through posts and came up with the fastest solution i could think of. I can prepare a mysql join for u if i remember to tune back in tonight.

Hi jimmyt1988

no problem. If you get a chance to prepare that MySQL statement, that would be very cool. I’m afraid my database query skills aren’t up to much.

Thanks again,

a|x

SELECT COUNT(tr.object_id) FROM wp_term_relationships tr, wp_terms t, wp_term_taxonomy tt, wp_postmeta m WHERE t.term_id = tt.term_id AND tt.term_taxonomy_id = tr.term_taxonomy_id AND tt.taxonomy = 'category' AND m.post_id = tr.object_id AND m.meta_value != '' AND m.meta_key = 'Your Custom Meta' AND t.name = 'Name of the Category'

Hi rcmck,

wow… I’d never have worked that out! Thank you very much!!

a|x