Best way to get the root site ID in MultiSite

[Nick Ciske]

We had a question come up at WP Wed regarding getting the root site ID in Multisite.

I had been using a magic number*:

switch_to_blog( 1 ); // 1 is a magic number

Then I switched to using the semi-obtuse constant in wp-config.php as that seems safer (in the rare case that would change):

switch_to_blog( SITE_ID_CURRENT_SITE ); // current root site, not current site user is browsing

Then Justin Foell ran across some code using a function I'd never seen before:

get_dashboard_blog(); // Huh?

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_dashboard_blog

Which returns the blog details for a blog that may or may not be the current site, and apparently may or may not be the root site either. It checks an option called dashboard_blog, but there doesn’t seem to be anywhere that can be modified (it appears nowhere else in the core code from what I can tell).

It gets a mention in the help tab but has no field on the Network Settings page:

Dashboard Site is an option to give a site to users who do not have a site on the system. Their default role is Subscriber, but that default can be changed.

Seems like the constant is the right way to go, and the dashboard_blog is a 3+ year old vestige of WPMU that may has not been fully removed or deprecated.

This Trac ticket backs this conclusion up:

http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/14696

That was a fun spelunking adventure into core!

And I just opened my first Trac ticket as a result:

http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/24838

* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/47882/what-is-a-magic-number-and-why-is-it-bad

_________________________

Nick Ciske

http://thoughtrefinery.com/

@nciske

[Toby C]

Nick,

Wonderful deep dive there!  Thanks for sharing, and congrats on your first Trac ticket!

Toby

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[JustinF]

I meant to respond to this much earlier... thanks for following up on our strange conversation Nick! And just like that, you've got a patch going into WordPress 3.7, W00t!