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.:

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

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 20th, 2007 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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