Arranging JOIN database results - php

Question

I am currently getting details from my 'social_posts' table, and then adding it's tags, the number of likes, and the number of answers it has to the resulting object. Is there a way I can be doing this without having to do extra queries in a loop?
$query = "SELECT * FROM social_posts JOIN users ON social_posts.user_id = users.id";
$posts = $this->db->query($query);
if ($posts->num_rows() > 0) {
foreach ($posts->result() as $p => $post) {
// Get the question's tags
$tags = $this->db->query("SELECT * FROM social_tags
WHERE post_id = ?", $post->post_id);
// Get the number of likes
$likes = $this->db->query("SELECT id FROM social_likes
WHERE post_id = ?", $post->post_id);
// Get the number of answers
$answers = $this->db->query("SELECT id FROM social_responses
WHERE post_id = ?", $post->post_id);
$post->tags = $tags->result();
$post->likes = $likes->num_rows();
$post->answers = $answers->num_rows();
$post->author = array(
"firstname" => $post->firstname,
"thumbnail" => $post->thumbnail,
);
}
return $posts->result();
} else {
return FALSE;
}

Answer 1

You may try this SQL:
SELECT
social_posts.*,
users.*,
GROUP_CONCAT(social_tags.name) AS tags,
COUNT(social_likes.id) AS likes,
COUNT(social_responses.id) AS answers
FROM
social_posts
JOIN users ON social_posts.user_id = users.id
LEFT JOIN social_tags ON social_tags.post_id = social_posts.id
LEFT JOIN social_likes ON social_likes.post_id = social_posts.id
LEFT JOIN social_responses ON social_responses.post_id = social_posts.id
GROUP BY
social_posts.id
You will get the tags as comma delimited string. Of course you need to adjust the column names to fit your database.