mgblahblah

I figured it out lol

After doing a lot of googling to no success, the following post gave me an idea:

http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/219501/wp-query-why-is-sticky-post-not-first-item-in-loop?rq=1

In it, it mentions that WP_Query checks the following before sorting Sticky Posts at the top:

if (  $this->is_home 
    && $page <= 1 
    && is_array($sticky_posts) 
    && !empty($sticky_posts)  
    && !$q['ignore_sticky_posts'] 
 ) {

Because I was running my query in a function independently called by AJAX, there was no Post or Page ID associated with this particular snippet of code. Therefore, WP_Query could not fulfill its conditional in order to do its default sticky_post function.

“get_posts” does not allow for sticky posts to show on top as it automatically sets “ignore_sticky_posts” to true.

Check out the WP Developers Page for get_posts (https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/get_posts/). On line 1591 of the code snippet, you will see:

$r['ignore_sticky_posts'] = true;

being explicitly set right before the query is returned.

So, we can neither use WP_Query nor get_posts in this particular instance.

My solution was to do the following:

// get_posts of all the possible posts, with your desired parameters and post-per-page set to -1
$all_posts = get_posts( $args );

// check if there are any sticky posts
$sticky = get_option( 'sticky_posts' );

// there are sticky posts, do this psuedo-code
if ( is_array($sticky) && !empty($sticky) ) {

    // do a get_post query for ONLY the sticky posts posts that are in your desired $args array
    $args['post__in'] = $sticky;
    $sticky_posts = get_posts( $args );
 
    // merge $total_stories_id into the end of $sticky
    $merged = array_merge( $sticky_posts, $all_posts );

    // remove duplicates and re-indexes
    $array = array_values( array_unique( $merged ) );

    // return a slice of X elements, starting at the $offset location
    $return_array = array_slice( $array , [calculated post offset], [your desired post-per-page] );
} else {
   // else, do wordpress default (wp_query or get_posts, it doesn't matter)
   $return_array = get_posts( $args );
}

For the sake of cutting down the array sizes being passed about, I did:

wp_list_pluck( [array], 'ID' );

on the 2 get_posts arrays. You don’t have to do this, it really depends on what kind of data you are passing back via AJAX.

I hope this helps anyone else!