Random taxonomy category list

Question

I'm trying to display one of my custom taxonomy lists on a page.

I want to show five but have them in different random orders when the page is refreshed.

I've tried using shuffle, but it just shuffles the first 5 and you dont see any of the the others.

I tried orderby RAND but it doesnt work. This is my code so far.

<?php
$all_artists = get_terms( 'artists', array(
"number" => 5,                           
'hide_empty' => 1,
'exclude' => array($cat->term_id),                      
) );          

shuffle( $all_artists );
foreach ($all_artists as $cat) :?>

<li class='post'>
<a href="<?php echo get_term_link($cat->slug, 'directors'); ?>">
<div class='thumb-post'>

<img src="<?php echo z_taxonomy_image_url($cat->term_id, 'poster'); ?>" />

</div>
<h2> <?php echo $cat->name; ?></h2>
<p class='meta'>
</p>
</a></li>


 <?php endforeach; ?>

Answer 1

There is no default way to sort terms randomly. There are ways to do this using php.

First, you'll need to remove the number argument from get_terms. As your code currently stands, you are getting 5 terms and shuffling them around.

For this to work, you'll need to retrieve all the terms from your taxonomy, shuffle that returned array randomly with the php function shuffle(), pass that through a foreach loop, create a new array and then use array_slice to to get the first 5 entries

Here is just a rough idea

$all_artists = get_terms( 'category' );          
shuffle( $all_artists );

$term_names = [];
foreach ( $all_artists as $cat )
    $term_names[] = $cat->name;

$output = array_slice( $term_names, 0, 5 );

foreach ( $output as $key=>$value )
     echo '<p>' . $value . '</p>';

EDIT

Here is another way to achieve the same. This involves creating a custom function that will sort the array randomly, and keeping the key/value pairs in place. This function comes from this answer on SO by @karim79

You can then use array_slice() to get the first % key/value pairs

function shuffle_assoc( $list ) 
{ 
    if ( !is_array( $list ) ) 
        return $list; 

    $keys = array_keys( $list ); 
    shuffle( $keys ); 

    $random = []; 
    foreach ( $keys as $key ) 
    { 
        $random[$key] = $list[$key]; 
    }
    return $random; 
} 

$terms  = get_terms( 'category' );  
$output = array_slice( shuffle_assoc( $q ), 0, 5 );
?><pre><?php var_dump($output)); ?></pre><?php