[wp-hackers] Odd last_updated Behavior

[Thomas Belknap]

It seems like, since switching from WPMU to WP3.0, the meaning of
"last_updated" in the wp-blogs table has changed. Previously, the
last_updated value was only changed when a new article was posted or
updated. This makes sense because when you want to display a list of the
most recently-posted articles across a multi-blog site, the most convenient
way to do so would be to check this table, as indeed get_last_updated does.

Now as I look at ms-blogs.php, it looks as though any change to the site at
all includes updating this value.  There are three functions that refer to
this field in the database that I can find: wpmu_update_blogs_date,
update_blog_details and update_blog_status. It looks like the old MU
function is about to get axed in favour of update_blog_details, but this
one, like update_blog_status, seems to be a general-use function having
nothing to do with publishing (the old MU function only hooks into the
publishing hooks), which means this behavior is about to be permanently
codified.

Is this intentional on the part of the main developers, or no? Its a pretty
radical alteration of the way the system functions and leaves us multi-blog
users without a direct API method for cleanly getting the most recent posts
from each blog.