Exclude newest post from category X but show rest

Question

I would like to show all posts but only exclude the NEWEST post from the 'Featured' category, other posts from this cat should display. Any idea what I should add to the loop to achieve this? I want all other posts from other cats to be displayed aswell!

Answer 1

A while back i posted a simple function that gets latest post in a certain category:

function get_lastest_post_of_category($cat){
    $args = array( 'posts_per_page' => 1, 'order'=> 'DESC', 'orderby' => 'date', 'category__in' => (array)$cat);
    $post_is = get_posts( $args );
    return $post_is[0]->ID;
}

So once you have that function you can use use WP_Query or query_posts and using the post__not_in parameter you can exclude that post, so something like:

query_posts(array(`post__not_in` => array(get_lastest_post_of_category($CAT_ID))));

just change $CAT_ID to the actual category id

Answer 2

Since by default the loop will retrieve the posts in descending order by date, you can do something like the following:

Outside the loop:

$featured_flag = false;

Inside the loop:

if(in_category('Featured')) {
    if($featured_flag) {
        the_content();
    }
    else {
        $featured_flag = true;
    }
}
else {
    the_content();
}

The first time a post from the Featured category is encountered (i.e. the most recent) it will be ignored and the $featured_flag will be set to true. Subsequent times through the loop the_content() will be displayed.

Edit: To account for pagination you could change $featured_flag to a $_SESSION variable. That way the true/false value will persist across multiple pages, and once it's been set to true posts will continue to display properly. Thanks for pointing out the error of my ways Bainternet :)