how to get all post with the same post meta?

Question

some of my posts have the post meta of "project_id". How can I retrive all the posts which have the meta key of "project_id" ? I tried:

$meta_key = 'project_id';
return $wpdb->get_var($wpdb->prepare("SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->postmeta WHERE meta_key = %s", $meta_key));

It returns nothing. Please help! Thanks!

Answer 1

As simple as this: $the_posts_you_want = get_posts( array( 'meta_key' => 'project_id' ) );

foreach ( $the_posts_you_want as $post )
{
    // Do whatever you need in here... 
    // Read further how to inspect the post object: http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/13063/how-to-inspect-global-variables-in-wordpress
    // echo each meta key
    echo $post->whatever;
    // or save it into a new array for further processing
    $project_ids = array();
    $project_ids[] = $post->whatever;
}
// If you saved them into an array, you can continue here...
foreach ( $project_ids as $id )
{
    // do stuff
}

Answer 2

Your query return nothing since there is no field ID in the postmeta table so it really should be post_id :

$meta_key = 'project_id';
return $wpdb->get_var($wpdb->prepare("SELECT post_id FROM $wpdb->postmeta WHERE meta_key = %s", $meta_key));