Grab the Latest Post from Multiple WordPress Blogs

I searched for a solution to this for hours, and ended up adapting some older code I’ve been using on my own website for years. Sometimes the best solution is the simplest one.

If you use WordPress and you want to put some of your posts on your homepage, this is one way to do it.

<?php
// The number of posts you want to display
$howMany = 1;
// Connect to the database
require_once("blog/wp-config.php");
// The amazing query. 100 is the number of characters to get from the post body
$posts = $wpdb->get_results ("SELECT `ID`, `post_title`, SUBSTRING_INDEX(`post_content`, ' ', 100) AS `post_excerpt` FROM $wpdb->posts
WHERE `post_status`= \"publish\" ORDER BY 'ID' DESC LIMIT " . $howMany);
// Instead of $wpdb->posts above, you could put the database table's name. This is useful if you have multiple blogs. Put the blog's table prefix followed by _posts, like wp_posts
foreach($posts as $post){
echo '<h2 class="posttitle"><a href="' . get_permalink($post->ID) . '">' . $post->post_title . '</a></h2>';
echo '<p>' . strip_tags($post->post_excerpt);
echo '<br /><a href="' . get_permalink($post->ID) . '">Continue reading <i>' . $post->post_title . '</i>...</a></p>';
} ?>

Here’s another good resource on the topic at scriptygoddess, though I didn’t take the time to fully understand what’s going on in that solution.

By the way, Blueprint is a pretty good CSS framework. Here’s a good tutorial on it, but it needs to be updated to reflect new changes in 0.5. Namely, the number of columns has been increased from 14 to 24, so make sure each row adds up to have 10 more columns than it does in that tutorial.