Custom query ordered list by field

• Sonnenschauer

• June 24, 2016 at 3:53 pm

I’ve tried to solve this problem by myself, but it seems that I have a lack of basic PHP-Wordpress knowledge. 🙂

The situation is easy: I have a defined custom post type named scripts with different fields (ACF made), one of them is called “video_number”. There are several posts with a value e.g. 70 for this “video_number”. Understandably there are many other video numbers with each a few posts. What I want to achieve is a list, grouped by the video_number.

The list should look like:

video 70
entry 4
entry 5
entry 6

video 75
entry 10
entry 11
entry 12

… etc

Now I don’t know how to realize this with PHP. I’ve studied the documentation of ACF, but all I achieved was a normal list of all entries.

Actualy the code looks like:

$the_query = new WP_Query(array(
	'post_type'			=> 'scripts',
	'posts_per_page'	=> -1,
	'meta_key'			=> 'video_number',
	'orderby'			=> 'meta_value_num',
	'order'				=> 'ASC'
));

?>
<?php if( $the_query->have_posts() ): ?>
	<ul>
	<?php while( $the_query->have_posts() ) : $the_query->the_post(); 

		$class = get_field('video_number');

		?>
		<li class="<?php echo $class; ?>">
			<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
		</li>
	<?php endwhile; ?>
	</ul>
<?php endif; ?>

<?php wp_reset_query();	 // Restore global post data stomped by the_post(). ?>

I know I have to implement another loop or something, but I can’t get it to work.

I appreciate any help. Thanks!

Adriano

• James

• June 24, 2016 at 5:01 pm

Hi @sonnenschauer

I believe your code sorts the posts based on the video number, right?

If you need to show the video number title so the result looks like grouped, then I think you can do it like this:

<?php if( $the_query->have_posts() ): ?>
    <?php $current_group = ''; ?>
    <ul>
    <?php while( $the_query->have_posts() ) : $the_query->the_post(); 

        $class = get_field('video_number');
        
        if( $class != $current_group ) {
            echo '<h2>Video '. $class .'</h2>';
            $current_group = $class;
        }

I hope this helps 🙂

• Sonnenschauer

• June 27, 2016 at 3:03 pm

Hi James

Fantastic, thank you very much!
That points me into the right direction and now I just have to combine this with the bootstrap accordion code and I will get a nice dropdown list.

Greetings,
Adriano