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Also known as 'Wordpress Tips: Pagination on secondary queries'. The quick and dirty way.

I'm working on using Wordpress as a CMS, and I've been making a 'News' page which the client can update. Basically, 'News' is a post category, and there are two columns of the page on the front end. The left column has titles and short decscriptions the most recent 4 posts from the 'News Category', while the right/middle column has the full version of the current news item being viewed. I did this with two queries: the first being the middle colum which was just a standard version of The Loop, and the second a custom query using the WP_Query object.

The problem came when I wanted to setup a pagination system for the left column. Normally the procedure is to use the in-built functions such as next_posts_link(), but I had a sneaky suspicion that this would only work with one Loop, and not on a little side query. So I had to find a quick and dirty solution (due to deadlines) so I decided to put a PHP variable in the URL, not exactly pretty, but as far I could tell, it was essential. The variable was used as an offset i.e. the page would load 4 posts starting from offset X.

First off, I'll print out the code I used at the bottom of the side query.:

$url = get_bloginfo('url');
$url = substr($url, 0, -4);
$url .= $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

$count = $query->post_count;

# the variable used was called off, and the offset I used was 4

if(!isset($_GET["off"]) && $count == 4)
{
$url = $url.'?off=4';
<code><a title="Previous 4 Stories" href="<?=$url?>">Older News</a></code>

}
else
{
$curroff = '?off='.$_GET["off"];

$prevoff = $_GET["off"] + 4;
$prevoff = '?off='.$prevoff;
$prevurl = str_replace($curroff, $prevoff, $url);

$nextoff = $_GET["off"] - 4;
$nextoff = '?off='.$nextoff;
$nexturl = str_replace($curroff, $nextoff, $url);

if($count == 4)
{

<a title="Previous 4 Stories" href="http://www.red-root.com/wp-admin/%3C?=$prevurl?%3E">Older News</a>
}

if($_GET["off"] != 0)
{
<a title="Next 4 Stories" href="http://www.red-root.com/wp-admin/%3C?=$nexturl?%3E">Newer News</a>
}
}
?>

What happens is that a URL is generated, $url, which contains the post name, plus the '?off=x' bit. I used str_replace() in order to take out the current off variable instead of using substr() because the offset would go into any number of figures.

This makes a bit more sense if you see the WP_Query object I used at the top

if(isset($_GET["off"]) == true)
{
$query = new WP_Query('cat=1&showposts=4&offset='.$_GET["off"]);
}
else
{
$query = new WP_Query('cat=1&showposts=4');
}