Wordpress Query Posts From Category Post on Static Page

Question

So I'm trying to query some posts from 1 category only and it does seem to be working. I tried get_post() also but no luck and after awhile I just caved and used query_posts (which is apparently bad practice). Here's my code:

<div id="primary">
            <div id="content" role="main">
                <?php query_posts('slug=cat1'); ?>
                <?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
                    <div class="post">
                         <h1>
                            <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>">
                                <?php the_title(); ?>
                            </a>
                        </h1> 
                        <small><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> by <?php the_author_posts_link() ?></small>
                            <br />
                            <br />
                        <div class="entry">
                            <?php the_content(); ?>
                        </div>
                    </div>
                    <hr />
                <?php endwhile; else: ?>
                <p><?php _e('Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.'); ?></p>
                <?php endif; ?>
            </div><!-- #content -->
        </div><!-- #primary -->

The second endif; is from above I have a test against the page slug. But from my understanding the query_posts should populate $post with all the posts from that category but I'm still getting posts from uncatagorized and another category so it's not filtering at all... Suggestions?

Edit1 I tried using cat=0 and cat=1 also cat=2 but the only one that actually filters is the cat=1 which filters to uncategorized. All the others show all posts. Not sure why...

Edit2 query_posts( array ( 'category_name' => 'Category1', 'posts_per_page' => -1 ) ); returned with the "else" statement saying there was no posts and nothing fit my criteria. I pulled that straight from the codex?

Answer 1

Weird Problem!, try the following:

• Make sure that the targeted categories are not empty.
• If you are using custom post type,include it in the query 'post_type'=>'advertisement' for example.

• If the targeted categories are special taxonomies,make sure to include it in the query : 'term'=>'cars' along with child 'cars'=>'toyota'.

  • in this example and just to make it clear : cars is like category and toyota is like uncategorized.

One last thing: trace the query by echoing the query to find out what is the exact arriving query:

echo $query_string;; place it in the top of the page before the <?php if ( have_pos... and right after the query_posts(..);

please tell us the results of the query in case it didn't work.

Answer 2

Simple code to show all post when you dont have anything on your query_var (the output will be -1 to show all posts) and certain post by getting the query_var.

if(get_query_var('cat') == ''){
   $cat = (get_query_var('cat')) ? get_query_var('cat') : -1;}
else{
   $cat = (get_query_var('cat'));}
$args = array('posts_per_page' => 5, 'paged' => $paged, 'cat' => $cat);
query_posts($args);

Hope it can helped you.

Edited: ofc you need to pass on your menu the 'cat' id into the URL.

Edited2: codex page

hooking into 'pre_get_posts' and altering the main query that way using is_main_query http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Action_Reference/pre_get_posts

its the preferred way... but the example above works like a champ!

Just make sure you call wp_reset_query() after you're done de 2nd loop.