Reply To: Position 9 posts in grid based on Options page & Have timed posts work

• John Huebner

• April 8, 2021 at 7:48 am

Sorry, still not sure I follow. I would set these fields up as post object fields to allow selecting a post rather than entering an ID manually.

So, thinking about what you have this is the way I would do something similar.

The options page has 9 post object fields that will appear and override specific positions. Each could be empty.

I would get the values from these fields and I would query all the posts to get 9 posts in descending date order excluding any posts selected in the post object fields.

I would then create a loop to show 9 posts using a counter to tell me what post from the query is next something like the following.

Please note that this is just a rough idea and a lot of it would need to be filled in.

$next_post = 0;
for ($i=0; $i<9; $i++) {
  if (/* test for top post at this position */) {
    $post = {post at this position};
  } else {
    $post = $queried_posts[$next_post]
    $next_post++;
  }
  // show the selected post
}

What this would do is show the posts that are selected filled in with other recent posts up to the 9 needed and avoid showing any post twice.

I can help flesh this out more if need be. I have actually created something like this before for a client. They wanted to events and to have a slider that showed the first X number of upcoming posts but they also wanted to be able to override any position in the slider with a “featured” event that may be further into the future.