Question

I have something like this:

ID | post_author | post_date | ... | post_title | post_status | ... | post_type
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1  | 1           | 2007-08-11| ... | A          | publish     | ... | post
2  | 3           | 2007-08-12| ... | B          | publish     | ... | post
3  | 1           | 2007-08-12| ... | C          | publish     | ... | post
4  | 1           | 2007-08-13| ... | D          | publish     | ... | post
5  | 3           | 2007-08-13| ... | E          | publish     | ... | post

What I like to do is to get the amount of posts by user and the title and ID of the last post. Based on above data the result should be that:

AuthorID | TotalPosts | PostID | PostTitle
------------------------------------------
1        | 3          | 5      | E
3        | 2          | 4      | D

What I have tried is this:

SELECT 
    p1.post_author         AS  Author,
    count(p1.post_author)  AS  Posts,
    p2.post_title          AS  Title
FROM 
    wp_posts AS p1
LEFT JOIN
    wp_posts As p2
ON
    p1.ID = p2.ID
WHERE
    p1.post_type   =   'post'
AND
    p1.post_status =   'publish'
GROUP BY
    p1.post_author
ORDER BY
    Posts   DESC,
    p2.post_date   ASC
LIMIT
    2

The problem is that I always get the title of the first post and not the title of the last post. Is there a way to get the title of the last inserted post ?

Kind regards

Answer 1

If you only want the latest title for every author, you can use an inline correlated subquery. This will be relatively fast with proper indexes – especially if you only want results for the 2 most published authors:

SELECT 
    post_author         AS  Author,
    COUNT(*)            AS  Posts,
    ( SELECT   p2.post_title
      FROM     wp_posts AS p2
      WHERE    p2.post_author = p1.post_author
        AND    p2.post_type = 'post'
        AND    p2.post_status = 'publish' 
      ORDER BY p2.post_date DESC
        LIMIT 1
    )                   AS  Title
FROM 
    wp_posts AS p1
WHERE
    post_type   =   'post'
AND
    post_status =   'publish'
GROUP BY
    post_author
ORDER BY
    Posts   DESC
LIMIT
    2 ;