reneelung

Hey Scribu,

So I ended up doing just that. The reason why it was getting a little hairy was 1) I have a massive data set and 2) paging already makes me nervous because I’m working with a codebase that isn’t my own.

Anyways, in case people have the same issue, I ended up making two separate queries (ie, two new WP_Query objects) and then combining the result set from both. This is because I needed a seamless continuation of the results (which are displayed as a grid), with paging.

$posts_with_pics_query = "select p.id from wp_posts as p, wp_postmeta as m
where m.post_id = p.id
and m.meta_key = '_thumbnail_id'
and p.post_type = 'athletes'";

$posts_with_pics_ids = $wpdb->get_col($posts_with_pics_query);

        $listing = new WP_Query(array_merge(
                   array(
                        'post_type' => 'athletes',
                        'connected_to' => $connected_post_id,
                        'paged' => $wp_query->query_vars['paged'],
                        'posts_per_page' => 16,
                        'post__in' => $posts_with_pics_ids
                         ), $meta));

        $listing_no_pics = new WP_Query(array_merge(
                            array(
                        'post_type' => 'athletes',
                        'connected_to' => $connected_post_id,
                        'paged' => $wp_query->query_vars['paged'] - $listing->max_num_pages,
                        'posts_per_page' => 16,
                        'post__not_in' => $posts_with_pics_ids
                        ), $meta));

So now there are two separate sets of posts, one taken from all the posts that have featured images, and those without. In order to merge them, we append the results of the second query to the first taking care to adjust post_count, found_posts and max_num_pages for paging etc:

//I'm showing 16 posts on each page, so if the first query's results //run out, I want to fill in the difference with posts from the second //set. However, if we set $listing->post_count to 16, then it'll keep //looping 16 times regardless of whether or not there are any posts //left in either set.
$listing->post_count = min(16, $listing->post_count + $listing_no_pics->post_count);
//For any given page, merge the results of both queries
        $listing->posts = array_merge($listing->posts, $listing_no_pics->posts);
//This is here to make sure the pagination function works properly
        $listing->found_posts = $listing->found_posts + $listing_no_pics->found_posts;
        $listing->max_num_pages = ceil($listing->found_posts / 16);

Thanks for the direction, and for getting back to me so quickly!