Associate Attachments with Multiple Parents

[filosofo]

There's no logical reason attachments couldn't be associated with multiple posts, and it would make a number of things easier and avoid needless duplication.

I suggest we do this by setting the attachment parent(s) in postmeta, with (possibly) multiple keys named _parent, like so:

+---------+---------+-------------------+------------+
| meta_id | post_id | meta_key          | meta_value |
+---------+---------+-------------------+------------+
|       1 |     123 | _parent           | 456        | 
|       2 |     123 | _parent           | 789        | 
+---------+---------+-------------------+------------+

Here, 123 is the attachment object's ID, and 456 and 789 are the IDs of its associated post objects.

Thoughts?

If you tell me this is slated for the media rework in the next version of WP, the power button will fall off your laptop.

This ticket sounds familiar.

I searched but couldn't find anything exactly the same.

There is a plugin -- ​http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/attachments/ -- that does something like this already. I support adding similar functionality to core.

This would be handled nicely by a posts2posts table. See #14513

I also support adding this feature to WP core.

Traditional bloggers often don't see use case for this, but for anyone who's tried making a rich media site or a newspaper/magazine site, its more obvious.

Replying to nacin:

This ticket sounds familiar.

#10657