Get posts from a custom post type by child categories of a parent category

Question

I have a custom post type called guides, there are 3 categories a post can be within, the 3 categories are child categories of a category with id 87.

Currently I can loop through these categories and display their name and/or ID. I need to loop through each category and display the posts in that category. I can't seem to figure out how. This is the code I have that loops through the categories and displays their ID. In this loop I would like to display the posts. How can I do this?

$categories = get_categories( array(
    'orderby' => 'name',
    'child_of'  => 87,
    'order'   => 'ASC'
) );

foreach( $categories as $category ) {
    echo $category->term_id;
}

Answer 1

Your start looks already ok. You now need to get the posts which have the term_id of your $category.

$categories = get_categories( array(
    'orderby' => 'name',
    'child_of'  => 87,
    'order'   => 'ASC'
) );

foreach( $categories as $category ) {

    // display current term name
    echo $category->name;

    // display current term description, if there is one
    echo $category->description;

    // get the current term_id, we use this later in the get_posts query
    $term_id = $category->term_id;

    $args = array(
        'post_type' => 'guides', // add our custom post type 
        'tax_query' => array(
            array(
                'taxonomy' => 'category', // the taxonomy we want to use (it seems you are using the default "category" )
                'field' => 'term_id', // we want to use "term_id" so we can insert the ID from above in the next line
                'terms' => $term_id // use the current term_id to display only posts with this term
            )
        )
    );
    $posts = get_posts( $args );

    foreach ($posts as $post) {

        // display post title
        echo $post->post_title;

        // display post excerpt
        echo $post->post_excerpt;

        // or maybe you want to show the content instead use ...
        #echo $post->post_content;

    }

}

As I pointed out, its not clear from your question if you are using the default "category" taxonomy of wordpress or a custom taxonomy.

As you can see this is just bare minimum code. So Iam sure you will need to extend it a little bit, for example adding permalinks to the post and stuff.

Also take a look at the codex regarding the get_posts() function. Here you get some info about taxonomy query´s with get_posts().

For all usable taxonomy parameters visit the wp_query() codex here.
Here you will see that in some cases (for example if a post is in multiple sub categories) you can also use an array of ID´s instead of a single term_id, like so:

'field'    => 'term_id',
'terms'    => array( 103, 115, 206 ),