Excluding a few pages from a query to get all pages for links WordPress
Okay, in the first draft of the site (the prototype), I had a nav bar that looked like this:
<ul id="nav">
<li><a href="#" id="link_for_list_of_collections">COLLECTIONS</a>
<ul id="list_of_collections">
<?php
query_posts('category_name=collections');
if (have_posts()) :
while (have_posts()) : the_post();
echo "<li><a href=\"/?p=";
the_ID();
echo "\">";
the_title();
echo "</a></li>\n\n";
endwhile;
endif;
wp_reset_query();
?>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="/?page_id=15">SPECIAL PROJECTS</a></li>
<li><a href="/?page_id=26">ABOUT</a></li>
<li><a href="/?page_id=18">STOCKLISTS</a></li>
<li><a href="/?page_id=20">SHOP</a></li>
<li><a href="/?page_id=22">PRESS</a></li>
<li><a href="/?page_id=7">BLOG</a></li>
<li><a href="/?page_id=24">LINKS</a></li>
</ul> <!--end of Nav-->
"collections" is a category of blog posts.
But now "special_projects" is also going to be a category of blog posts, and "press" is going to be a category of blog posts.
So I need to do 2 more loops like that first one. Easy enough, yes?
However, the listing of the pages themselves now need to become dynamic. I was cheating at first by hardcoding them.
Assuming I hard-code the links that need to have loops (of category specific blog posts) underneath them, how could I do a loop for all the pages except for the pages that I've already posted? Can I get the pages while excluding certain pages from the query?
A really elegant solution would be to match page names to the name of the category used for the related blog posts, but I suspect that is more complicated than anything I currently want to attempt.
Answers (3)
Maor Barazany answers:
Well, I'm not sure I really understood what you really need/want to do, but if you want to exclude pages/posts from the loop, you can just create an array of the ids you want to exclude, and then pass the array as a parameter to the query .
Suppose you have this array -
$excluded = array(15,26,18,20,22);
Then you could query posts as this :
$args = array('category_name' => 'collections', 'post__not_in' => $excluded);
query_posts($args);
Notice that I also changed the query paramters to be instead of GET style (param1=val¶m2=val2 to be an associative array of the parameters)
You can find all paramters of [[LINK href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/WP_Query#Parameters"]]query posts here[[/LINK]]
Maor Barazany comments:
Also, if you want to use page by slugs and not by IDs, you can use this little function to pass a page slug and return the page ID, then you could add these IDs to the array of IDs needed to be excluded.
function get_ID_by_slug($page_slug) {
$page = get_page_by_path($page_slug);
if ($page) {
return $page->ID;
} else {
return null;
}
}
AdamGold answers:
Try something like this:
$hardcore = array('collections', 'special_projects', 'press');
foreach( $hardcore as $name ) {
?>
<li><a href="#" id="link_for_list_of_collections"><?php echo $name; ?></a>
<ul id="list_of_collections">
<?php
query_posts('category_name=' . $name);
if (have_posts()) :
while (have_posts()) : the_post();
echo "<li><a href=\"/?p=";
the_ID();
echo "\">";
the_title();
echo "</a></li>\n\n";
endwhile;
endif;
wp_reset_query();
?>
</ul>
</li>
<?php
}
It will loop through all of your defined pages ($hardcore) and get the posts for each one of them.
Ivaylo Draganov answers:
Hello,
I've read carefully through your question and I assume that you want to build a navigation with certain top-level items listing posts by category as a submenu and other top level items listing pages. Excluding and including pages is very easy with <em>wp_list_pages()</em> but for the posts I had to build a loop. OK, here's what I've got (tested and works):
[[LINK href="http://pastebin.com/N1qDMxCh"]]http://pastebin.com/N1qDMxCh[[/LINK]]
You could achieve a similar result by using the built-in navigation menus but then you'd have to manually add each post. Well, hope that this solution works for you.
Cheers!