Question

I’ve manually created a custom table, sdp_invites, for my wordpress (v3.4.2) site. I’ve done this many times in the past, but now I’m unable to use any of the $wpdb methods:

global $wpdb;
global $current_user;

$query = "INSERT INTO spd_invites (sender_id,receiver_id,job_id,job_title,job_slug,employer_id) VALUES ('{$current_user->ID}','{$resume->user_id}','{$job_id}','{$job_title}','{$job_slug}','{$employer_id}')";

$wpdb->get_results($query); //ERROR...
$wpdb->query($query); //ERROR...

Here’s the error:

WordPress database error: [Table 'sow2.spd_invites' doesn't exist]
INSERT INTO spd_invites (sender_id,receiver_id,job_id,job_title,job_slug,employer_id) VALUES ('799','809','6','Professional Basket Weaver','professional-basket-weaver','5')

I know the table exists because I manually created it and I can see it in phpMyAdmin. Any idea why I’m getting this error?

UPDATE:
The WP user is called “root” (on my local dev setup). Here’s the privileges listed in phpMyAdmin:

User    Host             Type    Privileges  Grant  Action
root    localhost    global  ALL PRIVILEGES  Yes    

UPDATE2:
Just to rule out a bunch of possibilities, I tried a simpler query: "SELECT * FROM sdp_invites". This throws the same error. When I change to a wp core table, it works without error "SELECT * FROM sdp_invites"

Answer 1

My best guess is that you haven’t granted permission to you WordPress MySQL database user for your new custom table, presumably because you created it with a different MySQL user through phpMyAdmin. Try running:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON sow2.spd_invites TO 'wordpress_user'@'wordpress_host';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES; -- load new privileges

Replace “wordpress_user” with your WordPress MySQL username (can be found in wp-config.php) and “wordpress_host” with the hostname of your WordPress server (or localhost if it’s on the same server).

Keep in mind that this will allow the WordPress MySQL full permissions (SELECT, INSERT, DROP, etc) to this table, which may not be desirable. See the MySQL docs for my info on the GRANT command – http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/grant.html

You will want to run your insert using the query() function as it won’t return any results:

$wpdb->query($query);

To view all tables visible to your WordPress MySQL user, add the following to your theme’s functions.php file to print out the table names at the bottom of every page:

function show_all_tables(){
    global $wpdb; 
    foreach($wpdb->get_results("SHOW TABLES", ARRAY_N) as $table): 
        echo $table[0]."<br/>"; 
    endforeach;
} 
add_action('wp_footer', 'show_all_tables');