Query two fields and orderby another

• Seth Stevenson

• October 11, 2014 at 8:03 am

I’m building a directory with a ‘dmu_profile” custom post type. I want to be able to create a query that selects ‘Faculty’ and ‘Staff’ and then orders them by their ‘last_name’.

I have a checkbox that is called ‘profile_type’ that has many options including ‘Faculty’ and ‘Staff’ and a textfield called ‘last_name’.

Here is the query I’m trying:

$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;

$args = array(
    'post_type' 		=> 'dmu_profile',
    'meta_key'			=> 'last_name',
	'orderby'			=> 'meta_value',
	'order'				=> 'ASC',
	'suppress_filters' => false,
	'paged'				=> $paged,
    'meta_query' => array(
    	'relation' 		=> 'OR',
        array(
            'key' 		=> 'profile_type',
            'value' 	=> 'Faculty',
            'compare' 	=> 'LIKE'
        ),
        array(
            'key' 		=> 'profile_type',
            'value' 	=> 'Staff',
            'compare' 	=> 'LIKE'
        )
    )
);

$the_query = new WP_Query( $args );

This results in my server hanging. What is weird is that if I remove one of the meta_query options it works:

$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;

$args = array(
    'post_type' 		=> 'dmu_profile',
    'meta_key'			=> 'last_name',
	'orderby'			=> 'meta_value',
	'order'				=> 'ASC',
	'suppress_filters' => false,
	'paged'				=> $paged,
    'meta_query' => array(
        array(
            'key' 		=> 'profile_type',
            'value' 	=> 'Faculty',
            'compare' 	=> 'LIKE'
        )
    )
);

$the_query = new WP_Query( $args );

Or if I remove the ‘orderby’ the rest of the query works:

$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;

$args = array(
    'post_type' 		=> 'dmu_profile',
	'suppress_filters' => false,
	'paged'				=> $paged,
    'meta_query' => array(
    	'relation' 		=> 'OR',
        array(
            'key' 		=> 'profile_type',
            'value' 	=> 'Faculty',
            'compare' 	=> 'LIKE'
        ),
        array(
            'key' 		=> 'profile_type',
            'value' 	=> 'Staff',
            'compare' 	=> 'LIKE'
        )
    )
);

$the_query = new WP_Query( $args );

Any ideas?

• Seth Stevenson

• October 14, 2014 at 3:38 am

I found a WP ticket that says there’s currently an issue with meta_query and the ‘OR’ relation that I think is causing the issue – https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/25538

As a temporary solution I’m instead filtering out all non ‘Faculty’ and ‘Staff’ members by using ‘NOT LIKE’ meta_query(s):

 'meta_query' => array(
        array(
            'key' 		=> 'profile_type',
            'value' 	=> 'Adjunct',
            'compare' 	=> 'NOT LIKE'
        ),
        array(
            'key' 		=> 'profile_type',
            'value' 	=> 'Emeriti',
            'compare' 	=> 'NOT LIKE'
        ),
        (etc...)
    )