Question

I have a client project that has posts assigned to their country of origin.

The client wants to be able to search the posts by continent and or region.

I have a separate table that assigns each country to its respective region, and I have the WP query that uses the resulting array:

$country_names = array('England','France','Germany',...); // this would be the result from fetching countries associated with a region.
$args = array(
    'posts_per_page' => -1,
    'meta_query' => array(
        array(
            'key' => 'country',
            'value' => $country_names,
            'compare' => 'IN'
        )
    )
);
$query = new WP_Query( $args );

What I’m having trouble with is the part in the middle. Normally, I’d use some standard PHP/MySQL to craft the array:

<?php

//Process incoming variable
if(!empty($_REQUEST['region'])){
 $region = $_REQUEST['region'];
 } else {
 $region = NULL;
 }

// Make a MySQL Connection
$query = "SELECT * FROM regions WHERE region='$region'"; 

$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());

$row = mysql_fetch_array($result) or die(mysql_error());
echo $row['country'];
?>

However, I’m having trouble making it work within a WP template, since WP manages the incoming variables using its own internal functions.

Can anyone help me to connect the two together? I’m sure I’m overlooking some simple step here, or else I’m not using some built-in WP function.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

ty

Answer 1

Add this in your functions.php

add_filter( 'query_vars', 'addnew_query_vars', 10, 1 );
function addnew_query_vars($vars)
{   
    $vars[] = 'region'; // region is the variable you want to add       
    $vars[] = 'anotherVar'; 
    return $vars;
}

Then get it

$region=get_query_var('region')

Update

$regions = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT ".$region." FROM `".$wpdb->regions."`");
if($regions)
{
    foreach($regions as $region)
    {
        // your code
    }
}