Order Posts By Youtube Views

Question

I have a wordpress website where I post song lyrics. I have written a wp query to list specific posts and order them by post views. However, I would like to order them by youtube views instead.

I have been able to get the youtube view counts for the posts (songs), the problem is ordering the posts with it. This is what the code looks like:-

<ul>
<?php $item=0;  $loop = new WP_Query( array( 'post_type' => 'lyrics', 'date_query' => array( array( 'after' => '1 month ago' ) ), 'post_status'=> 'publish', 'meta_key' => 'post_view_count', 'orderby' => 'meta_value', 'posts_per_page' => 10 ) );
            while ( $loop->have_posts() ) : $loop->the_post();
            $song_name = get_the_title();

/*YOUTUBE QUERY HERE*/
$Yviews = 1234;

<li>
<?php echo esc_attr($song_name).' ('.$Yviews.' views)'; ?>
</li>
     <?php endwhile; wp_reset_query(); ?>

Things I Have Tried

I created a custom field and tried updating the value (after the youtube code) with update_post_meta(get_the_ID(), 'youtube_views', $Yviews); and changed 'meta_key' => 'post_view_count' to 'meta_key' => 'youtube_views' but this either didn't work, or I wasn't doing it properly.

How do I achieve this?

PS: Ultimately, what I am trying to orderby is the sum of the post views and youtube views, but I can live without this.

Thanks in advance.

PS: I have omitted the youtube api query to make the code as simple as possible.

Answer 1

https://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query#Order_.26_Orderby_Parameters

<ul>
<?php 
$item=0;  

$attr = array( 
  'post_type' => 'lyrics', 
  'date_query' => array( array( 'after' => '1 month ago' ) ), 
  'post_status'=> 'publish', 
  'meta_key'       => 'youtube_views', 
  'orderby'        => 'meta_value',
  'order'          => 'DESC',
  'posts_per_page' => 10 
);

$loop = new WP_Query( $attr );
while ( $loop->have_posts() ) : $loop->the_post();
  $song_name = get_the_title();

    /*YOUTUBE QUERY HERE*/
//    $Yviews = 1234;

    ?>
    <li>
    <?php echo esc_attr($song_name).' ('.$Yviews.' views)'; ?>
    </li>
  <?php endwhile; wp_reset_query(); ?>
</ul>

Answer 2

To order posts by meta fields you will need something like :

$args = array(
    "meta_query" => array(
        array(
            "key" => "youtube-views",
        ),
    ),
    "orderby" => "meta_value"
);

Where you should use the name of the database column as key, usually it should be specified in key - value pairs, but you should be able to use it with key only, however you will need to test it.