How to grab posts from most recently created category in WordPress

Question

I have an interesting problem that I could use some help resolving.

I have not done a ton of WordPress sites, but I am familiar with it, and very comfortable with PHP.

I need to know if there is a way to grab posts from the most recently created category in WordPress. Obviously, it's pretty easy and straightforward to grab articles from a specific category, and I don't need help there. What I need is to also filter for the most recently created category and only grab the sub-categories and posts that belong to it. I hope this makes sense.

My client has a magazine type thing going on. I am using the default category creation functionality of WP to allow them to create new "issues" each month. The category is actually the month and year. Think of a magazine, where for example the current issue(Category) is March 2015. They will create a new issue (Category) each month, and of course articles will be posted in sub categories of the current issue (Category).

How can I grab posts from the most recently created category for each month to display on the front end? This way in a table of contents it would look something like:

• March 2015 (Main, or "current" Category)
  • Sub Category
    • Article Title
    • Article Title
    • Article Title
  • Sub Category
    • Article Title
    • Article Title
    • Article Title

...etc.

How can I query only the most recently created category and articles belonging to it?

Answer 1

i think you need to save a date and the term id in options table, then you can search for the closest date and get the term id.

First you ned to use the 'create_term' hook:

function addDateTerm($tid, $tt_id){
    $date = date('l jS \of F Y h:i:s A');
    add_option( '_date_term_'.$tid, $date );
}
add_action("create_term", 'addDateTerm', 2, 10);

With this, any time the admin creates a new term, a new set of data is create in the wp_option table

Now you can get that options and search for te closest date and the term id

function find_closest()
{
$tId = get_terms( 'category', array('hide_empty'=> false));
$date = date('l jS \of F Y h:i:s A');
$termArray = array();

foreach ($tId as $term) {
    $dates = get_option( '_date_term_'.$term->term_id);
    $termArray[$term->term_id] = $dates;
}

foreach($termArray as $k=>$day)
{

        $interval[$k] = abs(strtotime($date) - strtotime($day));

}

asort($interval);
$closest = key($interval);

// print_r($termArray);
// print_r($closest);

echo $closest;

}

This function was taken from here and was modificated for this example.

The $closest variable shows the term id, and with that you can show your posts