cemery

Another bit of information: I updated my CSS files directly through the Amazon AWS console yesterday. It didn’t change immediately, but does seem to have updated finally.

So, I’m guessing this means that the distribution does take a while to update – I’ve read 24 hours.

I’m still tweaking a recent re-design of my site, so this isn’t fast enough. My solution for CSS has been to list my main style sheet in the Reject Files field of the W3 Total Cache CDN management screen. Perhaps I’ll include it in the CDN once things are more stable. Maybe minifying would help…?

If there is no way to update image revisions faster – I’m guessing the answer is to make sure images are correct to begin with (goodbye sweet compulsion) or change the image name if something faster is required.

I’m having a similar problem with Amazon Cloudfront. When I modify CSS or try to replace an image attachment, the original file refuses to update on the distribution. I’m not sure whether this is an Amazon issue or a W3 Total Cache issue I’m having…

Awesome! I think I found my answer, too. I modified the code I posted above with a get_posts loop and got this:

<?php
$cid = get_query_var('cat');
global $post;
$myposts = get_posts('cat=-22,-21,' . $cid . '&numberposts=5');
foreach($myposts as $post) :
  setup_postdata($post);
?>
   <li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>

This grabs the category parameter from the URL and passes it as the variable $cid to the get_posts function. By concatenating that variable with other category ids to remove the things I don’t want to see in the loop (i.e., “-22,-21”) I can drill down to what I want to display.

Using the get_posts function also allows me to add other filters, such as post count and offset.

The only thing I’d like to change is to be able to filter the URL category id based on “and” logic – as in category_and – instead of subtracting out categories. Seems more elegant and manageable.

Does anybody know if you can pass category_and as an argument to get_posts with additional filters included such as numberposts, offset, etc? If so, do you have an example…?

I’m have a similar issue, Jill. I’m trying to have certain category pages such as http://www.mysite.com/category/something display several blocks of post teasers from that category based on co-categories.

So, for instance, it would look like:

Main category for page: Vermont
Loop 1: Activities (in Vermont)
Loop 2: National Parks (in Vermont)
Loop 3: Stores (in Vermont)

I’d like to do things to each of these loops, such as limiting the post number and having a “featured” first post with a post thumbnail displayed.

The confusing part, for me, is preserving the parameters created by the category URL while modifying the multiple loops on the page to create the filtered blocks.

Using query_post to filter each loop seemed like a good idea, but the Function reference entry says it shouldn’t be used for multiple loops. Also, it overrides the parameters from the category URL, unless you use:

global $query_string;

and then recall it as such:

query_posts($query_string . "&order=ASC");

Perhaps it’s a matter of putting conditional category logic inside the standard loop, as they show on The Loop page in the documentation

<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

 <?php if ( in_category('3') ) { ?>

 <?php } else { ?>

 <?php } ?>

But this doesn’t solve my questions about limiting the number of posts shown or perhaps excluding certain post types from showing up in the loop.

If I figured it out I’ll let you know.