WordPress custom query by meta_key

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to achieve a specific query to modify my search results for posts with WordPress. I'm trying to search via a custom field called "Common Authors".

There can be multiple Common authors, which is causing my query to sometimes fail. Here is what I've got for now:

<?php
...
$query->set('meta_key', 'common_authors');
$query->set('meta_value', serialize( array(strval($_GET['common_author'])))); // I get a single ID from the url as a string
$query->set('meta_compare', 'IN');

This is what I see when I var_dump the query:

'meta_key' => string 'common_authors'
'meta_value' => string 'a:1:{i:0;s:5:"17145";}'

This works fine if there is only one common_author.

However, there can be multiple common_authors for a post. Here is a meta_value example from the database:

a:4:{i:0;s:5:"14409";i:1;s:5:"17145";i:2;s:5:"14407";i:3;s:5:"14406";}

Could somebody help me out, to figure out how to adapt my query, so that it would return this one as well?

Sayed Mohamed · Accepted Answer · 2021-03-16 16:01:23Z

1

Try This One Work Prefect!

 $args = array(
        'post_type' => 'post',
        'meta_query' => array(
            array(
                'key' => 'common_authors',
                'value' => array ( 'author1', 'author2', 'author3' ),
                'compare' => 'IN'
            )
        )
    );
$query = new WP_QUERY($args);

if You Need To Use It In pre_get_posts

$meta_query = array(
                array(
                    'key' => 'common_authors',
                    'value' => array ( 'author1', 'author2', 'author3' ),
                    'compare' => 'IN'
                )
            );

$query->set('meta_query', $meta_query);

edited Mar 16, 2021 at 16:01

answered Mar 16, 2021 at 14:23

Sayed Mohamed

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2 Comments

Thomas Miller Over a year ago

That doesn't seem to work.. I'm overriding the default search via the pre_get_posts filter, I'm guessing that may have something to do with it.

Sayed Mohamed Over a year ago

Hi Code Updated

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