Question

I’m trying to write a custom SQL query that will create a list of the most recent Posts AND comments and I’m having trouble visualizing how i can do this.

I can pull the latest comments by date DESC and i can pull the latest posts by date DESC but how do I make a feed / query to show them both?

Here is my comment SQL

SELECT comment_id, comment_content, comment_date
FROM wp_comments
WHERE comment_author = 'admin'
ORDER BY comment_date DESC

Edit: more clear:

Sorry, I should have been a little more clear. I want to have a list like this based on what date they occurred:

WordPress post 
wordpress post
wordpress comment
wordpress post
wordpress comment

So if someone comments on a 4 month old post, it will still show up at the top of this ‘feed’

Answer 1

I think your best bet (and to avoid using custom SQL) would be to grab the latest X posts and X comments, loop over each and build an array to merge the two into one ‘most recent’ data set;

$comments = get_comments('number=X');
$posts    = get_posts('posts_per_page=X');

$most_recent = array();

foreach ($comments as $comment)
    $most_recent[strtotime($comment->comment_date_gmt)] = $comment;

foreach ($posts as $post)
    $most_recent[strtotime($post->post_date_gmt)] = $post;

unset($comments, $posts);

krsort($most_recent);
$most_recent = array_slice($most_recent, 0, X);

foreach ($most_recent as $post_or_comment) {

    $is_post = isset($post_or_comment->post_date_gmt);

    // output comments and posts
}

It ain’t too pretty, but it should do it.