One most recent entry from multiple channels

Question

I'd like to return 5 entries from 5 channels in a list, the list being comprised of:

• the one most recent entry from each channel
• in order of date

A simple exp:channel:entries loop with a limit of 5 and channel="blog1|blog2|blog3|blog4|blog5" will bring back the 5 most recent entries overall, but not just one entry per channel.

And 5 channel:entries loops will bring back the most recent, but not with them in the right order -- and the overhead of 5 channel:entries loops makes me cringe.

How would you do it?

Answer 1

You're in custom plugin territory Travis. Pretty easy though.

• Run one (very quick) query to get the latest entry_id in each channel (query exp_channel_titles only). Save them all to an array.
• Then, you can either return those entry_ids as a variable (concatenated with |), which you pass to your channel:entries tag in your template, or instantiate a new Channel instance and return it directly.

See this great answer on a related question by Adrian for some sample code.