Question

I am developing a webpage at http://www.knowledgenation.us and currently I have roughly 500 posts on the page. I believe that is far too many posts to expect someone to read through but I do believe that my page has return value. I want people to return to the webpage on a regular basis and always get something new from the site.

That being said, I would like to post three random posts from my database to the body of the web page that is the theme that I have. I would also like to know how to make that code modular so that I can reuse it for a new incarnation of this website that is going to pull in content from RSS feeds from two websites that friends of mine are developing.

That all being said, bottom line, how do you post random posts to a website, what would the code look like and please be kind in explaining because I am quite new to PHP programming and would not understand most of what the code is about. I just recently got a http://www.lynda.com account and am going to be learning all about PHP but for right now I understand little.

I thank you in advance for helping me with this.

Answer 1

When you query your posts, you can pass on query attributes such as a category, included/excluded post ids, limits and offsets, etc.. You can also define how your results will be ordered — by which field and into which direction (ASC/DESC).

The order_by parameter can be a regular field names like title or date, and also rand as in random to fetch random posts.

Here’s an example to use outside the loop, fetching five random posts:

<ul>
<?php
$args = array('numberposts' => 5, 'orderby' => 'rand');
$rand_posts = get_posts( $args );
foreach( $rand_posts as $post ) : ?>
  <li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

And another example for a regular loop:

<?php
$args = array('numberposts' => 5, 'orderby' => 'rand');
query_posts($args);

while (have_posts()) : the_post();
  the_content('Read the full post »');
  // And so forth…
endwhile;
?>

Hope you get the picture…