alphabetized listings of all book reviews by either book title or author’s name,
The alphabetized by title would be a query_posts with arguments like:
$args=array(
'orderby' => 'title',
'order' => 'ASC',
'post_type' => 'post',
'post_status' => 'publish',
'posts_per_page' => -1,
'caller_get_posts'=> 1
);
$my_query = null;
$my_query = new WP_Query($args);
The by author would require sorting the users alphabetically, then cycling through each user and retrieving and displaying that author’s posts.
Hi MichaelH,
Very helpful as always, but I guess I didn’t elaborate enough on my problem.
When we list a book review, the title of the post goes like this:
“A Reliable Wife” by Robert Goolrick
I was thinking RegEx because I would need this one under R by title. So I’d have to write a regular expression that ignored ‘a’ & ‘the’ at
the beginning of a title. Then there’s all the problems with isolating the author’s last name, especially when there are multiple authors, as in:
“A Patriot’s History of the United States” by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen
I think I need to play with custom fields a bit. If I can set some up that don’t get displayed on the landing pages but can be used to sort alphabetically I think all would be golden.
Is it possible to set fields like:
Title: Patriot’s History of the United States A
Author: Schweikart Larry
Author: Allen Michael
That would allow me to get that book on the alphabetical pages for titles beginning with P and authors beginning with A & S?
I’m going to browse the Codex & see what I can piece together that way & check back here in a bit. Thanks.
I opted to go for Custom Fields. I spent a whole day updating all of our posts. Then I discovered the limitations of comparing custom fields.
So far I can only make the thing work to display books where the author’s last name begins with A:
$args = array(
'category__not_in' => array(11, 12),
'orderby' => 'meta_value',
'meta_key' => 'var',
'meta_compare' => '<',
'meta_value' => 'B',
'order' => 'ASC',
'post_type' => 'post',
'post_status' => 'publish',
'posts_per_page' => 20,
'caller_get_posts'=> 1
);
$my_query1 = new WP_Query($args);
But when I try a second compare statement to get authors starting with B my second statement cancels out the first. Therefore:
'meta_compare' => '>',
'meta_value' => 'B','
meta_compare' => '<',
'meta_value' => 'C',
will return A & B authors.
Is there no simple way to make this happen? Even a mildly complicated one?
I tried the CF Taxonomies plug-in, but that wasn’t living up to it’s expectations to say the least.
What’s the goal there? List all posts in order by custom field value?
And for additional clarification, are you looking to get all posts with this custom field key at once, then sort by starting letter, or page them, ie. Those starting with A on one page, then B on another, and so on..
Yes, we want posts listed in order by a custom field, but grouped & separated alphabetically.
We want to have A-Z navigation across the top:
A – B – C – D – etc.
Clicking on A would give you any author with a last name beginning with A, and so on down the line.
It’d be a really handy way for users to browse a bunch of books.
In that case it might be easier to use wpdb to get the post ids from the postmeta table WHERE meta_key = ‘var’ AND meta_value > ‘A’ AND meta_value < ‘B’ then use those post id values to get your posts.
[edit fixed wpdb link ]
Hi Steve,
Just want to restate one of the original queries i made above, is the intention to list all these entries on one single page, or split them across multiple pages? It wasn’t quite clear in your last response..
If they’re all going onto a singular page, then you’d only need to query for all entries with that meta_key and then do the sorting when it comes to putting/displaying the entries on the page.
Michael’s suggestion is a good one, you’d probably be better off with a custom written query, so you can tailor it to suit exactly what you need rather then needing to fiddle around with the supported query parameters in WP_Query or query_posts.
t31os_
The intention is to have 1 letter per page when it displays, and there will likely be some pagination involved when we get more titles.
Ideally I’d like to do it all in one page that passes variables, likely through the URL – /books?start=A&end=B or something like that.
MichaelH – I’ll look into that wpdb stuff – it looks mighty complicated to my eyes, but maybe if I start at the beginning & read every word it’ll start coming together. I’m a little rusty on coding DB calls, and have virtually no experience with inner joins, but I’ll give it a whirl.
No join necessary:
<?php
$meta_key = 'var';
$start_value = 'A';
$end_value = 'B';
$postids = $wpdb->get_col($wpdb->prepare("
SELECT DISTINCT post_id
FROM $wpdb->postmeta
WHERE (meta_key = %s)
AND (UPPER(meta_value) >= %s AND UPPER(meta_value) < %s)",$meta_key, $start_value, $end_value));
if ($postids) {
$args=array(
'post__in' => $postids,
'post_type' => 'post',
'post_status' => 'publish',
'posts_per_page' => -1,
'caller_get_posts'=> 1
);
$my_query = null;
$my_query = new WP_Query($args);
if( $my_query->have_posts() ) {
echo 'List of Posts';
while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
<p><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></p>
<?php
endwhile;
}
wp_reset_query(); // Restore global post data stomped by the_post().
}
?>
I know we’re getting closer to a solution, but I’m getting one of those pesky fatal errors:
Fatal error: Call to a member function get_col() on a non-object in /***/wp-content/plugins/exec-php/includes/runtime.php(42) : eval()'d code on line 7
Do I need to globalize something somewhere first perhaps?
Might need a global $wpdb;
Here’s the error msg when we try that:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_GLOBAL in /***/wp-content/plugins/exec-php/includes/runtime.php(42) : eval()’d code on line 6
Maybe globalization isn’t the issue.
I can duplicate that but not sure why that plugin exec-php is doing that.
Code works fine with Otto’s PHP code widget and works fine in a Template so you might need to resort to putting that in a template.
Actually after I added the global $wpdb; to the post it worked for me using the exec-php code plugin.
