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im currently developing a plugin that will read an external xml, and convert the data to a custom post type. Each post needs around 50-60 meta_fields. Right now im looping through each piece of needed data in the xml and running a update_post_meta() on each of them. This turns out to be very inefficient because each update_post_meta results in a separate request, which in my case results in a server timeout when the xml has a lot of data.

imagine that the $event['meta'] has 50 fields, and I need to run all 50 updates on 500 posts in one go.

    // add/update meta fields
    foreach ($event['meta'] as $meta_key => $meta_value) {
        update_post_meta( $post_id, $meta_key, $meta_value );
    }

Is it possible to combine all the meta updates into one request? maybe in combination with the wp_insert_post() ?

its important that it must create a meta field if it doesn't already exist, while updating it if it does, much like update_post_meta does.

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  • Do you need all meta fields to be searchable (full text)?
    – kaiser
    Mar 13, 2015 at 16:28
  • What do you mean? Some fields needs to be searchable as string, most fields just need to be displayed on templates.
    – Malibur
    Mar 13, 2015 at 16:41
  • if meta data needs to be part of a query, then it needs to be in an individual row in the database, and must be inserted individually. if meta data does not need to be part of a query, it can be saved as an array under a single key, which will only require one insert.
    – Milo
    Mar 13, 2015 at 16:46
  • Yeah i will need to use a lot of it in filters for WP_Query objects, so I'd prefer if it got saved in separate meta_fields
    – Malibur
    Mar 13, 2015 at 16:48
  • would it even be possible with sql commands to handle all meta data for one post in one go??
    – Malibur
    Mar 13, 2015 at 16:48

1 Answer 1

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Do all insert manually via wpdb (SQL). you can do multiple inserts with one sql statement. the wp_post_meta is very simple built.

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