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?

[filosofo]

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.

[nacin]

This ticket sounds familiar.

[filosofo]

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

[anonymized_126485]

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

[scribu]

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

[dartanjan]

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.

[solarissmoke]

Replying to nacin:

This ticket sounds familiar.

#10657