There is a new feature that is coming to WordPress multisite is and it is called site meta. This new functionality, was originally purposed by John James Jacoby and it is key building block for the future of multisite. But to understand it’s importance, you must first understand how WordPress multisite is built.
The basics
There are two key concepts that you have to understand about multisite before continuing, sites and networks. Basically, once you install multisite, it installs some new tables in the database. These tables are used to store data from the networks and sites. The default installs of multisite installs one network and a single sites. All sites are part of a network, but it is also possible to have a multi network. See JJJ’s amazing wp-multi-network for more detail. Currently if you want to extending multisite, it is easy to extend networks, as there is already a network settings, which stores networks meta table. Developers can already create their own network options pages and store data as a network. Plugins like yoast and jetpack already do this. But if you want to extend a site, it not currently possible. Developers can store site level data in the options table for each site. This is fine, however, within the multisite context it is hard to query this data out the database because how the data is stored. Take for example, if you wanted to query sites by site name this is impossible. The only way search by name, to get all sites and loop around each one, switch to site and compare the result in php. Something like this.
$site_name = 'spacedmonkey';
$site_ids = get_sites(['fields' => 'ids', 'number' => -1]);
foreach($site_ids as $site_id){
switch_to_blog($site_id);
$option = get_option('sitename');
if($option == $site_name){
// Found it!
}
restore_current_blog();
}
There are plugins that extend currently extend multisite. The most popular of which is WordPress MU domain mapping which installs a new table ‘wp_domain_mapping’ in the database. Installing new tables into database isn’t a bad thing, but it can be problematic. Firstly, the installation of said table isn’t guaranteed to work. There can be issues database permissions or a table of that name already exists. Also any non standard table, all caching will have to handled manually in code by the developer.
The site meta adds a new table into core database, that enables developers store per site data in a uniform way. There will be a full API to interact with this data in databases. The new functions include.
- add_site_meta
- delete_site_meta
- edit_site_meta
- get_site_meta
- delete_site_meta_by_key
- update_sitemeta_cache
This will make it easy for developers to extend multisite and make many things possible. The new table will on all new multisite installs and the new table will be added when you run the database upgrade in the network admin screen. The is a new helper function called is_site_meta_supported what automatically detects if the table exists.
This new feature is currently in development, your input is value, please leave your comments in trac.