Question

A newbie at wordpress, trying to figure how to retrieve a specific post content into a div.

This is what I have as of now,

<div style="margin-top: 100px;">
    <?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
    <?php the_content(); ?>
    <?php endwhile; else: ?>
    <?php endif; ?>
</div>

while this works great, I have some questions,

1 – Is this fine? I spoke to some people who “know” WP, and they said I should avoid getting posts into my html.

2 – If I replace the above code with,

<div style="margin-top: 100px;">
    <?php $postId = 1; get_post($postId) ?>
    <?php the_content(); ?>
</div>

It doesn’t work.

3 – What modifications do I need to make to this code to make it work?

REQUEST: please don’t move this to wordpress.stackexchange.com, as there is minimal activity there.

cheers.

Answer 1

Take a look at the Function Reference for get_post
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_post

The examples are illustrative. To get the content of the post, you would do something like this:

<?php
  $my_id = 7;
  $post_id_7 = get_post($my_id); 
  $content = $post_id_7->post_content;
?> 

Note that we have used get_post to retrieve the database record we are interested in, and from among the fields returned, we are making use of post_content.

This is different from using the_content, which displays the content of the post currently being processed by The Loop.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/the_content

I imagine the former approach is better for what you are trying to do.