Question

I don’t know PHP all that well so I hope I will be showing enough code when I ask this question. I have a part of my homepage that is going to show the latest 5 blog posts and so I set it up like this:

<?php
function get_latest_post_html() {
    $content = "";
    query_posts('showposts=5');
    while (have_posts()){
        the_post();
        $content .= "<p class='title'><a href='" . get_permalink() . "'>" . get_the_title() . "</a></p>\n" .
                "<p class='excerpt'><a href='" . get_permalink() . "'><img src='" . wp_get_attachment_url( get_post_thumbnail_id($post->ID) ) . "' class='rt-image img-left wp-post-image' style='max-width:175px;'/></a>" . get_the_excerpt() . "</p><br/><hr/>";
    }
    wp_reset_query();

    return "<div class='latest-post'>\n$content\n</div>";
}

add_shortcode('get_latest_post', 'get_latest_post_html');
?>

It calls the last 5 posts just fine, but I don’t want to have it display the <hr/> on the bottom of the 5th post.

Answer 1

Setup some logic in your while loop to conditionally display the <hr >.

For example:

$i = 0;
while (have_posts()) {
  ++$i;
  the_post();

  // ...

  if ($i < 5) {
    $content .= '<hr />';
  }
}

Note: WordPress may not return 5 posts, so you should consider that path. I would also discourage string concatenation in tight loops. Refactor your code and use echo.