Broken pagination, need help figuring out why!

Question

I just tried slapping together a poor-man's "featured post" section with this exact code out of my index.php:

<div id="post-wrapper">
<?php if (is_home() && !is_paged()) : ?>

    <?php query_posts('cat=13&showposts=1'); ?>
    <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

        <div class="sticky" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

            <h2><a class="post-title" href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

            <?php include('meta.php'); ?>

            <div class="entry">

                <?php the_excerpt(); ?>

                <div class="after-excerpt">
                    <?php if (has_tag()) { ?>
                        <div class="tags">
                            <img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/tag.jpg" alt="Tagged as:" />
                            <?php the_tags('', ', ', '<br />'); ?>
                        </div>
                    <?php } ?>

                    <div class="read-more-link">
                        <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">Read More &raquo;</a>
                    </div>
                    <br style="clear: both" />
                </div>

            </div>

        </div>
    <?php endwhile; ?>

<?php endif; wp_reset_query(); ?>

<?php query_posts('cat=-13'); ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
    <!-- do my thing for normal posts -->

So as you can see, I've tried using multiple loops (first time trying that too :P) and the result is great...on the front page of the blog! If I were to go to the 2nd page however, it displays only the non-Feature posts that were on the first page. So in essence, it's almost working but I need your help resolving this issue!

Also, if anyone reads this and has a better way of doing it I am all ears! This was simply my first attempt at making this feature without the use of a plugin :)

Thanks in advance, and any/all help is much appreciated!

EDIT :

Issue resolved. Wasn't correctly querying all other posts in 2nd loop.

Replaced:

<?php query_posts('cat=-13'); ?>

with:

<?php query_posts($query_string . '&cat=-13'); ?>

and that simple fix did it for me :) hope someone else stumbles onto this and is helped as well!

Answer 1

First, if you want to load posts outside of the default query for the page, use WP_Query. Calling query_posts should be done only to modify parameters of the default query.

The pagination issue stems from calling query_posts, you're overwriting the page parameter (and all other parameters) by calling it in your template. If you want to retain the original parameters and modify them:

global $query_string; // get the global query_string for this query
query_posts( $query_string . '&cat=-13' ); // add to the query string whatever we want to change from the defaults

EDIT- oops, too slow. I would still change your featured query to use WP_Query instead. Once you're in the template, your default query for the page has already run. When you call query_posts you're throwing out that query and making a new one, which is inefficient and should be avoided if possible.