How to: rotate wordpress posts into headline/feature status

If you’re using the new Arthemia theme for WordPress you might notice that there are two areas of the theme that can have articles promoted to; namely Headline and Featured sections. This is controlled by category association. Basically you have a post and if you want it in the Headline area of the theme you attach the category “headline” to it, similarly for the featured section. Now, let’s say you don’t want to manually change this all the time since it can be time consuming to promote posts to those categories if you want rotating content.

Here’s a simple solution. In this bash script I connect to MySQL and remove the current associations from posts and then randomly choose posts to be promoted to the Headline and Featured categories. This can be modified for other ideas you might have involving categories/posts/randomized associations in WordPress. You can also find the script here: http://pastebin.com/1QqiM5rh – wordpress is clobbering my line breaks so use the Pastebin version if you want to copy/paste the content.

The queries contain IDs for the Headline and Featured categories. In my installation, which will be different than yours, has the Headline category as ID=’103′ and Featured as ID=’104′ – replace as needed. I’m also doing some matching (see the WHERE sections) so that I don’t promote posts with certain IDs that are specific to the site for this script. You’ll want to customize the queries as needed for your site.

#!/bin/bash
#wordpress connection settings
USER="wordpress"
PASSWORD="password"
HOST="mysql.mysite.com"
DB="wordpress"
MYSQL="/usr/bin/mysql"
#remove current relationship for headline/post, set random post as headline
HEADLINE0="DELETE FROM wp_term_relationships WHERE term_taxonomy_id='103'; INSERT INTO wp_term_relationships (object_id,term_taxonomy_id,term_order) VALUES ((select ID from wp_posts where post_name NOT LIKE '%autosave%' AND post_name != '' and post_name !='hello-world' AND ID !='2' AND ID !='16' AND ID !='35' AND ID !='44' ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1),'103','0');"
#select current headline post - for reference, we never use this in the script
HEADLINE1="select * from wp_term_relationships where term_taxonomy_id = '103';"
#remove current relationship for featured/post, set random post as featured
FEATURED0="DELETE FROM wp_term_relationships WHERE term_taxonomy_id='104'; INSERT INTO wp_term_relationships (object_id,term_taxonomy_id,term_order) VALUES
((select ID from wp_posts where post_name NOT LIKE '%autosave%' AND post_name != '' and post_name !='hello-world' AND ID !='2' AND ID !='16' AND ID !='35' AND ID !='44' ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1),'104','0'),
((select ID from wp_posts where post_name NOT LIKE '%autosave%' AND post_name != '' and post_name !='hello-world' AND ID !='2' AND ID !='16' AND ID !='35' AND ID !='44' ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1),'104','0'),
((select ID from wp_posts where post_name NOT LIKE '%autosave%' AND post_name != '' and post_name !='hello-world' AND ID !='2' AND ID !='16' AND ID !='35' AND ID !='44' ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1),'104','0'),
((select ID from wp_posts where post_name NOT LIKE '%autosave%' AND post_name != '' and post_name !='hello-world' AND ID !='2' AND ID !='16' AND ID !='35' AND ID !='44' ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1),'104','0'),
((select ID from wp_posts where post_name NOT LIKE '%autosave%' AND post_name != '' and post_name !='hello-world' AND ID !='2' AND ID !='16' AND ID !='35' AND ID !='44' ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1),'104','0');"
#execute queries
echo -n "Updating headline: "
until $MYSQL --user="$USER" --password="$PASSWORD" --host="$HOST" "$DB" -e "$HEADLINE0"; do
echo "[FAILED]"
echo -n "Running again: "
done
echo "[OK]"
echo -n "Updating featured: "
until $MYSQL --user="$USER" --password="$PASSWORD" --host="$HOST" "$DB" -e "$FEATURED0"; do
echo "[FAILED]"
echo -n "Running again: "
done
echo "[OK]"


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.