[wp-hackers] Pull Latest Post from Each of 6 Categories

[Mike Schinkel]

"Nathan Rice" <ncrice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Don't get me wrong. I'm not blaming anyone for not anticipating my 
> specific use-case. That would be stupid. I'm just saying that this 
> could be an opportunity for the WP_Query class to get better.

Agreed 100%.

> The site I'm maintaining is a new-style site that has a content heavy 
> homepage. It relies heavily on categories to pull content, and it 
> would be nice if the WP_Query class would allow me to pull latest 
> story(ies) from multiple categories with as few queries as possible. 
> From what I hear, the WordPress bottleneck is always the database, 
> so I want certainly don't want to aggravate that by being
> inefficient.

I agree with that, see the type of site you mention as a trend, think that WordPress doesn't currently handle that well, and ideally would like to see it handle it better. 

> I'm definitely glad WordPress provides functions and classes that 
> pull data from the database. PHP + SQL is not something I'm 
> interested in learning at the moment, despite the fact that I'm sure 
> it would be good for me.

I was mostly waxing philisophical on that and do see value in the functions. But I also see their limits and understand they are not panaceas.

That said, my guess is you'd be better off in your own work if you did take some time to learn SQL.  It's really not that hard. (But I do know that sometimes we don't have the mental bandwidth to deal with too much learning; I suffer from that frequently.)


> From what I can tell, not much NEW functionality has been added to 
> the class in a while.  

Not to be contrary to myself, but on the flip side that means it's more likely to be robust.

> It would be nice to get new features and parameters that would
> address these specific use cases, especially considering the 
> prevalence of WordPress being used to run large news sites.  

Agreed. One thing that concerns me about WordPress (and moreso about Drupal, which is one reason I left Drupal) is the number of queries run for each page load. Not sure how to resolve that in the general case, though. 

> There CAN'T be any weak points when traffic surges. 
> Performance is a HUGE deal.

Agreed, even when there are valid reasons for performance issues, people running the sites don't care. IOW, make it work or else! :-)

> I appreciate that.  For now, I'm going leave it as-is and hope 
> that wp-super-cache keeps us above water. If it doesn't, you'll 
> definitely be hearing from me :-)

Feel free to ask. :)


-Mike Schinkel
Custom Wordpress Plugins
http://mikeschinkel.com/custom-wordpress-plugins