Randomize Repeater Rows…

• john.marcello

• January 14, 2016 at 8:24 am

I am using this to randomize the rows of a repeater field. This technique worked a while back on another site a long time ago. However on this site I am getting the output, just not randomized. Any help is greatly appreciated.

<?php 
$repeater = get_field('contributors_grid','option');
$count = count(get_field('contributors_grid','option'));
$random_rows = array_rand($repeater, $count);
  if(is_array($random_rows)) {
    foreach( $random_rows as $random_row ){ ?>
      <li class="item">
        <a href="<?php echo $repeater[$random_row]['contributors_link'] ?>" target="_blank">
          <img src="<?php echo $repeater[$random_row]['contributors_image'] ?>" alt="<?php echo $repeater[$random_row]['contributors_title'] ?>" />                        		      
          <div class="name"><?php echo $repeater[$random_row]['contributors_title'] ?></div>
        </a>
      </li>
    <?php } 
  }
?>

Note: I tried Elliot’s shuffle method from another thread too and that didn’t work either.

Regards,
John

• John Huebner

• January 15, 2016 at 12:03 pm

What’s being returned by

$repeater = get_field('contributors_grid','option');
// try echoing it to see it it's an array
echo $repeater;

There are times when this might return an array, but there are other times when it will just return the number of rows in the repeater. It is unclear to me why there is inconsistent behavior like this when getting a repeater.

You may need to loop through the repeater to get the values before you can randomize them.

• john.marcello

• January 16, 2016 at 2:26 am

Hi John:

I tried echoing and its says Array. Any idea on how to proceed?

Regards,
John

• John Huebner

• January 16, 2016 at 1:32 pm

I’ve actually never used array_rand before so I did some testing. Basically what I found was that no matter how many items you want returned, the keys are always returned in order. So it you pick 3 of 5 you might get 0, 2, 4 but never 4, 0, 2. So when selecting the 5 of 5 it will always return 0, 1, 2, 3, 4

shuffle is what you’re looking for

$repeater = get_field('contributors_grid','option');
shuffle($repeater);