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1. stormrider
   Member
   Posted 4 years ago #

   I would like to add a "breaking news" ticker just under the header on my site's custom front page. I want it to show only posts less than 3 days old from a specific category.

   My thought is to put the entire mini-loop inside a php if clause, compare the post date to a number, and only print the breaking news ticker if it's less than that number. The idea being if I post something in the "breaking news" category, for the next few days it shows up in a ticker box on the front page. If there aren't any breaking news posts younger than three days, the ticker doesn't show up.

   I have the mini-loop working beautifully, posting the 6 most recent news posts on a static home page, using this code:
   

   <?php
    $my_query = new WP_Query('category_name=news&showposts=6');
    while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
    $do_not_duplicate = $post->ID;
   ?>
   <a>">
    <?php the_title(); ?>
   </a>
   <?php endwhile; ?>

   Any thoughts or ideas, or has anyone done something like this before?

2. stormrider
   Member
   Posted 4 years ago #

   Half of the problem was that I didnt' know what to search for. I finally stumbled upon a older post here that helped a bit, and I seem to have hacked this together to make it work how I want.

   It made it a bit ugly, but by changing the number that the posts are measured against I can make the block disappear, which means it's working right.

   <?php
   // Start of the mini-loop, specifies which category to look in and how many posts to pull//
    $my_query = new WP_Query('category_name=breaking-news&showposts=1');
    while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
    $do_not_duplicate = $post->ID;
   // Adjust 604800 to the number of days in seconds that you want to check against. Posts will only appear if they are newer than that time.//
    if ( (current_time(timestamp) - get_the_time('U') - (get_settings('gmt_offset') * 3600) ) < 604800 )
    {
     echo "<tr><td class=breakingnews colspan=3>Breaking News:<a href=";
     the_permalink();
     echo ">";
     the_title();
     echo "</a> </td></tr>";
    }
   endwhile; ?>

   I hope this helps others out, I'm actually pretty surprised I made this work. If anyone has improvements or suggestions, or if there is a better way to do this, I would be happy to hear them.

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