How to Update Wordpress Page Excerpts?

Question

I wanted to update all my pages' excerpt with custom excerpt. So I created my own plugin with few lines of code. I dunno why it is not working, This is my code

function update_my_metadata_new(){
$pages = get_pages();
foreach ( $pages as $page ) {
    // Run a loop and update every meta data
    if(in_category('books')){
        $the_post = array(
        'ID'           => $page->ID,//the ID of the Post
        'post_excerpt' => 'Read books',);
        wp_update_post( $the_post );
    }
  }
}

This plugin will loop into all pages in the given category and update the excerpts, when activated. and I have enabled excerpts for pages by adding this code.

add_post_type_support( 'page', 'excerpt' );

to the functions.php file.

Answer 1

It looks like you are using in_category outside of the main loop. You need to pass in the ID of the page for in_category to work:

in_category('books', $page->ID )

function update_my_metadata_new(){
    $pages = get_pages();
    foreach ( $pages as $page ) {
        /* pass the page ID here */
        if( in_category( 'books', $page->ID ) ){
            $the_post = array(
                'ID'           => $page->ID,//the ID of the Post
                'post_excerpt' => 'Read books',
            );
            wp_update_post( $the_post );
    }
  }
}

register_activation_hook( __FILE__, 'update_my_metadata_new');