I want Page titles and excerpts to show up on home.php in certain order

Question

In the functions.php, I have the following code added:

add_post_type_support( 'page', 'excerpt' );

This allows pages to have excerpts. The reason I want an excerpt is because I want to call only pages with excerpts to be one of 3 modules on the home page.

On the front page, in my home.php file, these 3 modules will show the titles and excerpts of the pages in which I have added an excerpt. At anytime, the editor should be allowed to change the placement or page so that any existing page could theoretically become a module on the home page.

For example, I have an About, New Patients and Services page, all three of which I have added text to the excerpt field (I will leave all other excerpt fields blank on pages which don't need to appear on the front page). On home.php, in the order I just listed, I want the title and excerpt of each page to show up as three columns.

Here's how I intend to style it: https://i.sstatic.net/jOPb0.png

It's possible these 3 modules will either need an order change or replaced by another page, which is why I'm looking for dynamic modules.

I have created two custom fields, called home_widget and order. home_widget is equal to either true, whereas order is equal to the order they should appear on the page.

This code is wrong, but I'm looking for similar logic:

<?php
  $pageExcerpt = get_the_excerpt(); 
  if (is_page() && $pageExcerpt !== '') {
    the_excerpt();
  }
?>

In other words, if a page exists AND it has an excerpt, then call the_excerpt() but do it in the order I define by custom field entry. This allows for dynamic insertion as needed.

How do I write this code to work as I stated?

Answer 1

Unless you have a particular reason to have meta box order values , that would be overkill.

Instead ditch the excerpt for pages, and add a meta box called "intro_content" (or whatever).

Then in a home.php query you can easily grab this info and order it however you want using html.

For instance:

// replace 1, 2, 3, with actual page ID's
$about_meta = get_post_meta( 1, 'intro_content');
$new_patients_meta = get_post_meta( 2, 'intro_content'); 
$service_meta = get_post_meta( 3, 'intro_content'); 

// div styles and echo the title + the above or whatever

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_post_meta

Added this after your comment/edit.

To order the metabox you can add another one with a numerical value, or even better add a dropdown box ( for example called 'order_value_dropdown').

That way in your query you can query the order by value of the dropdown. For example :

 $order_meta = get_post_meta( 3, 'order_value_dropdown'); 
 if ($order_meta = 1 )
 //grab the intro_content meta from that post
 if ($order_meta = 2 )
 //grab the intro_content meta from that post
 // etc, etc

Answer 2

Initially, Wyck told me to study the WP_Query article on WordPress's site. This was very overwhelming to try and pick up, and I searched the web for articles that might give me a quicker answer, but I couldn't find anything that was relevant.

This is similar but different than Wyck's answer, but I only figured it out by studying a new article just released on Smashing Magazine on How to Build a Media Site on WordPress. I would still prefer to query whether a page contains an excerpt or not, and only show that page, but this is a good solution in the interim.

<?php
    // Get the pages with excerpts
  $excerpt = new WP_Query(
    array(
        'post_type' => 'page', // Tell WordPress which post type we want
        'posts_per_page' => '3', // Show the first 3
        'orderby' => 'meta_value', // Order by meta_key, defined on next line
        'meta_key' => 'order', // Look for numerical value in this key
        'order' => 'ASC', // Ascending order
        'meta_query' => array( // Return only pages with home_widget meta key set to true
            array(
                'key' => 'home_widget',
                'value' => 'true',
                )
            )
        )
    );
?>

<ul class="excerpt">
    <?php //Start new loop looking for pages only with $excerpt from above 
          while ( $excerpt->have_posts() ) : $excerpt->the_post(); ?>
    <li class="module">
        <h3><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>
        <p><?php the_excerpt(); ?></p>
    </li>
    <?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>

Answer 3

One problem:

"On the front page, in my home.php file".

The home.php template file is not the Front Page template; rather, it is the Blog Posts Index template. The Front Page template is front-page.php.

You should never see both is_home() and is_page() return true at the same time.

Thus, you should be using front-page.php as your Front Page template file, and you should be using is_front_page() as your conditional.