Group Posts By Custom Meta Value: Date

Question

I have a post with a custom meta value which is populated via a jQuery datepicker and it gets stored in the following format: yyyy/mm/dd - is there a way I can group all posts from the same day together easily?

I'm not using Wordpress's publish date, as I need to have future posts published. I know using the function 'the_date()' will by default in Wordpress only show the date once per x amount of posts, giving the appearance they're grouped. Is there anything that does something similar with a custom meta date value?

Answer 1

The only built in way ( using a function) is to use WP Query and the custom field parameters, specifically meta_query and compare.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query#Custom_Field_Parameters

An example to get you started:

$query = new WP_Query( array( 'meta_key' => 'your_date',  'meta_compare' => '=' ) );

Alternatively, the custom field functions in Wordpress do not have many parameters, they are basically for adding and retrieving data, which you can then use with native PHP, for instance you can return the custom field as an array using something like:

$meta_date_array = get_post_meta($post_id, $key, false);
ksort($meta_date_array);

and use PHP's ksortto sort the order.