Sometimes I bring information to a couple of my other WordPress blogs via RSS feed. It’s a nice feature, allowing you to create several posts at once without manual entry. Unfortunately if RSS feed is broken or improperly formatted it can result in blank posts imported into the blog.

I was looking for a WordPress plugin that would allow me to mass-delete empty posts, but apparently none exist. You can delete posts based on date, tags, category, but not the content. Fortunately if you have access to phpMyAdmin of your MySQL installation – there is a solution.

Warning! Backup your database before performing following operations!

In phpMyAdmin locate the database that hosts your blog data. In a standard WordPress installation table “wp_posts” holds all blog’s posts. In case of WordPress MU the table name would be “wp_<blog_number>_posts“, for example “wp_6_posts“. The content of the post in both cases is stored in “post_content” field. So to delete all empty posts in a standard WordPress following SQL query can be used:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_content=''

To delete blank posts for a specific blog in a WordPress MU installation, query similar to this one can be used:

DELETE FROM wp_6_posts WHERE post_content=''

This example assumes you’re working with blog #6.

One Response to “WordPress MU: Delete Empty Posts”

1. Angielski Wrocław says:

   07/19/2011 at 2:42 PM

   That is just what i needed. Still no plugin to remove empty posts but this solution works fine.