Trim posts from WP-Query?

Question

I wish to show in my front page a number of posts determined by the following criteria: show all posts from current month (actually from the month corresponding to the most recent post) ; but if that number is less that (say) 8, then show the 8 most recent posts.

Assuming that I know that no month will have more than (say) 20 posts, I'd tought of setting posts_per_page = 20, grab normally the most recent 20 posts, and afterwards do the appropiate trimming (slice) in php. (To do it in SQL seems too convoluted)

BTW: at first I thought that add_filter( 'posts_results', ... ) would be appropiate, but it's difficult to discriminate there whether the query corresponds to the main loop, or to some other query (eg., the Most-recent-posts widget...). I then coded the logic in the theme, in the index.php template.

The problem is that WP-query does not seem to support -cleanly- a trim of the posts... I must manually reassign the posts and count attribute (I think that the rewind() method should recompute the count, but...)

Do you feel this is too dirty? Any other ideas?

Answer 1

I think it would be better to just do a second query if you don't have 8 posts for that month, for example:

//get current date
$date = getdate();

//setup args
$args = array(
    //basic stuff
    'posts_per_page' => -1,
    'post_stutus'    => 'publish',
    //time parameters
    'year'           => $date['year'],
    'month_num'      => $date['mon']
);

//create WP_Query
$my_query = new WP_Query;

//execute first WP_Query
$posts = $my_query->query( $args );

//check first WP_Query, update if necessary
if( count( $posts ) < 8 ) {
    //update args
    unset( $args['year'] );
    unset( $args['mon'] );
    $args['posts_per_page'] = 8;

    //do query
    $posts = $my_query->query( $args );
}

//do your loop and such

That's some rough code that I just banged out real fast, but you get the idea