Question

Sometimes I think I haven’t got the brain power for programming, I just can’t get my head round this.

I’ve got a table called wp_postmeta which looks kind of like this

+-----------+-----------+------------+--------------+
|  meta_id  |  post_id  |  meta_key  |  meta_value  |
+-----------+-----------+------------+--------------+
|    1      |     1     |   type     |   movie      |
+-----------+-----------+------------+--------------+
|    2      |     1     |   name     |  dark knight |
+-----------+-----------+------------+--------------+
|    3      |     2     |    type    |   tv show    |
+-----------+-----------+------------+--------------+
|    4      |     2     |    name    |   lost       |
+-----------+-----------+------------+--------------+
|    5      |     3     |    type    |   tv show    |
+-----------+-----------+------------+--------------+
|    6      |     3     |   name     |  house       |
+-----------+-----------+------------+--------------+
|    7      |     4     |   type     |   movie      |
+-----------+-----------+------------+--------------+
|    8      |     4     |   name     |  godfather   |
+-----------+-----------+------------+--------------+

What I want to do is select the all the movies. I need to find WHERE meta_key = ‘type’ AND meta_value = ‘movie’ then get the meta_key “name” where the post_id’s match and select the meta_value thus giving me “dark knight” and “godfather”.

Sorry for the poor explanation but WordPress doesn’t have a logical structure to this part of the database, making it quite hard to explain.

Answer 1

select pm2.meta_value as movie_name
  from wp_postmeta as pm1 join wp_postmeta as pm2
    on pm1.post_id = pm2.post_id
  where pm1.meta_key = 'type' and pm1.meta_value = 'movie' and
    pm2.meta_key = 'name'