Is there a way to exclude posts based on meta_values?

Question

I have a need to exclude posts based on a custom field type. It will probably be a field such as "legacy" or "depricated". I searched for an example on how this would be done but I haven't found anything worth while. Any help would be appreciated.

<?php
            $software = array('post_type' => 'software', 'category_name' => $model);
            query_posts( $software );
            get_template_part( 'loop', 'software' );
            wp_reset_query();
            ?>

Answer 1

I met the same problem before. I tried to use meta_query parameter in the query argument, but didn't succeed. The code I tried to use looks like this:

$software = array(
    'post_type' => 'software',
    'meta_query' => array('key' => 'legacy', 'value' => 1, 'compare' => '!=')
);
query_posts($software);

But the problem is this query also excludes posts that don't have that meta key.

So I had to use a custom query, that gets all posts with legacy meta key, and then excludes them:

global $wpdb;
$legacy = $wpdb->get_col("SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->postmeta WHERE meta_key='legacy'");

$software = array(
    'post_type' => 'software',
    'post__not_in' => $legacy
);
query_posts($software);

Hope this can help you.