WordPress get specific posts in arbitrary order

Question

Right now, I'm doing:

$posts = get_posts(array('post_type' => 'page', 'post__in' => array(1, 3, 2, 9, 7)));

and am having two issues:

Post 3 is of 'post_type' => 'post', so it doesn't get selected, but I want it! If I leave out 'post_type' => 'page', then only post 3 is selected (because it must assume 'post_type' => 'post'.).
I want to be able to order the posts arbitrarily by their ids. If I knew how to use MySQL, I could do:
```
SELECT * FROM wp_posts WHERE ID IN (1, 3, 2, 9, 7)
ORDER BY FIND_IN_SET(ID, '1,3,2,9,7');
```

But, how should I do this with WordPress?

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 02 '10 at 15:34

1

First fetch all posts arbitrarily by their ids and then loop through all the posts

You can do in this way:-

$posts=$wpdb->get_results("SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE ID IN (1, 3, 2, 9, 7)
ORDER BY FIND_IN_SET(ID, '1,3,2,9,7')");
$count=count($posts);
for ($counter=0 ; $counter < $count; $counter++)
{
   $post=get_post( $posts[$counter]->ID, $output );
  //do your stuffs with posts
}

Hope this helps

answered Dec 02 '10 at 15:34

Shakti Singh

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This would work, but I think you're doing excessive SQL queries. AFAIK, `get_post` does an SQL query. So, you could just replace the first line with `$order => array(1, 3, 2, 9, 7)`. But then you'd still be doing five SQL queries, one for each post, Also, `foreach` is faster & cleaner in this & most cases. See this [answer](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4329800/wordpress-get-specific-posts-in-arbitrary-order/4337226#4337226). – ma11hew28 Dec 02 '10 at 16:31

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 02 '10 at 16:23

Kawauso on the #wordpress IRC channel informed me that "post_type takes an array of values." From that, I found that the following also selects post 3:

So, I did the following:

$post_ids = array(1 => 0, 3 => 1, 2 => 2, 9 => 3, 7 => 4);
$posts = get_posts(array('post_type' => array('post', 'page'),
                         'post__in' => array_keys($post_ids)));
$ordered_posts = array(0,0,0,0,0); // size of five; keeps order
foreach ($posts as $p) {
  setup_postdata($p);
  $ordered_posts[$post_ids[$p->ID]] = array(
    'permalink' => get_permalink($p->ID),
    'title' => $p->post_title,
    'excerpt' => get_the_excerpt(),
    'date' => date('F j, Y', strtotime($p->post_date)));
}

fregante · Answer 3 · 2016-03-24T09:34:35.020

0

According to this thread, you can use this code and then use the classic WordPress loop:

$args = array(  
'post_type'=>'page',  
    'orderby'=>'menu_order',  
    'order'=>'ASC'  
);  
query_posts($args);

edited Mar 24 '16 at 09:34

answered Dec 02 '10 at 17:10

fregante

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This is good to know, but in this case, they are not all pages, and I think they're in a different order than menu order. – ma11hew28 Dec 02 '10 at 19:29

WordPress get specific posts in arbitrary order

3 Answers3