It’s a new year, time for a new improved custom WordPress loop!

Here’s a little code snippet that you can use to place a loop almost anywhere inside a theme, plugin or a framework like Thesis.

First function does the hard work and return an two dimensional array with each post, custom post etc.. easily accessible.

And designers will like this, the code is separate from the styling side, the second function calls the first and it is there that you can handle each post and add styles and other HTML.

function dmaCustomLoop( $args ){
        global $post;
        $output = ""; // empty the string
        // The Query
        $the_query = new WP_Query( $args );
 		$the_result = array();
        // The Loop
        while ( $the_query->have_posts() ) : $the_query->the_post();

            $permalink = get_permalink();
            $title = get_the_title();
            $theexcerpt = get_the_excerpt();
			$thecontent = get_the_content();

           	$brisbane_multi = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'brisbane_multi', true);

			array_push($the_result, array("permalink" => $permalink, "title" => $title, "theexcerpt" =>$theexcerpt , "thecontent" => $thecontent) );

        endwhile;
        wp_reset_postdata();

        return $the_result;
}

So place the above in your theme functions.php or inside custom_functions if you’re using Thesis. Then were you would like to call the function use this.

$args = array(
		    //'posts_per_page' => 2,
		    //'cat' => 11,
		    'post_type' => 'positiontype',
		    'orderby' => 'asc'
		);
		$result =  dmaCustomLoop( $args );

		// loop through the results
		foreach($result as $value){
			print "my perma is " . $value['permalink'];
			print "my title is " . $value['title'];
			print "my excerpt is " . $value['theexcerpt'];
			print "my content is " . $value['thecontent'];
		}
		unset($value);

For more information on the arguments you can send to WP_Query check out this page on the WordPress Codex.

This is not rocket science but it took me a while to find the answer, so here it is.

Situation: On some WordPress archive pages you’d like to order the posts by title rather than the default date order.

The following function will do just that, it will merge the WordPress loop query with two new parameters ‘orderby’ and ‘order’ – leaving the rest of the query as is.

Here I’ve hooked it to a thesis hook, but you can hook it anywhere as long as its before your loop starts.

The other part of this is the conditional statement. In this example I’ve got is_tax(‘buscategory’), relevant for a particular job, but you can use any WordPress conditional tags.

function change_post_order(){
		if (is_tax( 'buscategory' ) || is_search()){
			global $wp_query;
			$args = array_merge( $wp_query->query, array( 'orderby' => 'title','order' => 'ASC' ) );
			query_posts( $args );
	}
}
add_action('thesis_hook_before_content','change_post_order');

From time to time it’s required to create a loop that will respond with posts, pages or custom posts that have a certain custom field. This code is a quick example.

It’s looking for post types that are ‘pages’ and a custom field that is ‘scroller’ with a value being ‘true’. For all the parameter you can use including other operators like ‘like’ etc.. see this page on the WordPress codex.

function dma_scroller_setup(){
		$args = array(
		'post_type' => 'page',
		'meta_query' => array(
			array(
				'key' => 'scroller',
				'value' => 'true',
				'compare' => '='
			)
		)
	 );
	$the_query = new WP_Query( $args );
	// The Loop
	while ( $the_query->have_posts() ) : $the_query->the_post();
		echo '<li>';
		the_title();
		echo '</li>';
	endwhile;

	// Reset Post Data
	wp_reset_postdata();