Custom Post Types strange pagination problem

Question

Have a strange problem with pagination, the query work fine when I'm in homepage, but if click for the next page I get a 404 error. Disabling permalinks settings, I saw that in the query string (when I move on to the next page), then I have ?paged=2 as query argument, but not post_type=job_listing (in this case). Here is my code:

global $wp_query, $paged;

if ( get_query_var( 'paged' ) )
    $paged = get_query_var( 'paged' );
else
    $paged = 1;

if ( get_query_var( 'post_type' ) )
    $post_type = get_query_var( 'post_type' );
else
    $post_type = 'job_listing';

$args = array(
   'post_type' => $post_type,
   'paged'     => $paged,
);

query_posts( $args );

And then I have a normal loop cycle and a wp_reset_query() at the end. The problem is that when open a pagination link the url look like www.example.com/?paged=2 and not www.example.com/?post_type=job_listing&paged=2 which works if I type it manually.

I tried everything to make it work but it keeps ignoring the post_type var in all pages.

Answer 1

I think your problem is at the following lines:

if ( get_query_var( 'post_type' ) )
    $post_type = get_query_var( 'post_type' );
else
    $post_type = 'job_listing';

Your post_type var will probably already being set, so you are calling some different post type (the one stored inside the query_vars array with the post_type key), which maybe does not have a second page and therefore leads you to your 404. You can simply

var_dump( $GLOBALS['wp_query'] );

or

printf( '<pre>%s</pre>', var_export( $GLOBALS['wp_query'], TRUE ) );`

depending on your debugging setup and take a look at the output to see what goes wrong in detail.

Aside from that, I'd

1. Use get_posts() or new WP_Query() to not mess up the main query (query_posts() is a private function reserved for core usage).

2. Set the query var fixed for that query:

   $post_type = 'job_listing';