Add a custom field value for all of an Author’s posts

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I’m trying to add a custom field value for all of each author’s posts and display it on the author’s profile page.

I have a Like button function I created where when a user likes a post it adds +1 to post custom field _post_like_count so if a post has 10 likes the value in _post_like_count is 10.

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What I’m looking to do is take all of each author’s posts add up the total likes they have for all their posts combined so if they have 5 posts that each have 10 likes each the total value should be 50. 

$author_posts = get_posts( array('author' => $author->ID) ); // Author's ID
$total_like_count = 0; // needed to collect the total sum of likes
foreach ( $author_posts as $post ) {
    $likes = absint( get_post_meta( $post->ID, '_post_like_count', true ) );
$total_like_count += $likes;
}

This is the php I”m using which I thought should work and it does for some of the authors it appears but not for others, as I have some author’s that should have 1000+ likes and it displays 77, where if an author has just 1 post with 17 likes it will display that properly.

For a little about what I”m trying to do on the top line I’m getting the post author’s ID, then I run the foreach to get each post and store the meta field value in $likes variable and then calculate it up in the bottom line in the $total_like_count which should be the number of all the likes for the author’s posts combined.

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2 comments

  1. Your get_posts() function is only pulling the 10 most recent posts of that author (or whatever number you have set as the default posts per page). Add 'nopaging' => true to get all of the author’s posts.

    Also, if you’re doing this inside the loop, using $post in your foreach loop may be problematic. Try switching it to something like $author_post and then use:

    $likes = absint( get_post_meta( $author_post->ID, '_post_like_count', true ) );

  2. Your problem can be solved by setting posts_per_page to -1 but I’d be tempted to run a custom database query instead. The benefit of doing it this way is you’re only running one SQL query.

    By using get_posts you’re running a SQL query every time you call get_post_meta which is incredibly inefficient. You may not notice it if an author has 10 posts but once you get into the hundreds the impact will be apparent.

    Example:

    function wpse_get_author_like_count( $author_id ) {

    global $wpdb;

    $like_count = $wpdb->get_var( $wpdb->prepare( "
        SELECT SUM( mt.meta_value ) 
        FROM {$wpdb->postmeta} AS mt
        LEFT JOIN {$wpdb->posts} p ON p.ID = mt.post_id
        WHERE mt.meta_key = '_post_like_count'
        AND p.post_type = 'post',
        AND p.post_status = 'publish'
        AND p.post_author = %d
    ", $author_id ) );

    return (int) $like_count;

}

    Then to use it you would write:

    $author_like_count = wpse_get_author_like_count( 10 ); // replacing this with the correct author ID of course.

    This was coded on the fly by the way so I can’t guarantee it’s totally accurate. I am curious to know the result.

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