Display posts in random post types

Question

I am currently working in a project in wordpress.

Here i have to get all posts from two custom post types namely pt1, pt2.

But here i want to display posts with random post type(pt1, pt2).

Example)

I want to display first post from pt1, next from pt2 and again pt1 and next pt2 and so on...

How can i do this. Any help? This is the code:

 $args = array(

'posts_per_page'   => 5,    

'orderby'          => 'post_date',

'order'            => 'DESC',   

'post_type'        => array('pt1', 'pt2'),  

'post_status'      => 'publish'

 ); 

$posts = get_posts( $args );

$num=1;

foreach($posts as $post) {

    if( $num % 2 == 0 )             

        echo $post->post_title.$post->post_type;

    else    

        echo $post->post_title.$post->post_type;

    $num++;

}

Answer 1

There is no easy query that will do that (see below). You will need to process your results in PHP to get the sort you are looking for. Something like this:

$args = array(
  'posts_per_page'   => 5,    
  'orderby'          => 'post_date',
  'order'            => 'DESC',   
  'post_type'        => array('post', 'book'),  
  'post_status'      => 'publish'
); 
$posts = get_posts( $args );

$even = $odd = array();
$ei = 0;
$oi = 1;
foreach ($posts as $p) {
  if ('post' == $p->post_type) {
    $odd[$oi] = $p;
    $oi = $oi + 2;
  } elseif ('book' == $p->post_type) {
    $even[$ei] = $p;
    $ei = $ei + 2;
  }
}
$posts = $odd + $even;
ksort($posts);
foreach($posts as $post) {     
  echo $post->post_title.$post->post_type;
  echo '<br>';
}

Obviously, I used post types that exist on my dev server, but swapping those out is trivial. The idea is the same.

The only way I know to make sure you get equal numbers of each post type in the query would be to create a UNION. I don't have the time write that now but option 4 from this answer should get you started.