filter on get_posts efficiently

Question

I have posts with the following categories:

A category that is a year(2017,2018...2022), a category that is type:(worldwide,Europe, local)

I am trying to give users in the frontend advanced search ability they have two multiselect dropdown, they can pick a year or several. and a type. (both of these are technically categories)

For example select post from cat 2017 or cat 2018 AND that are (cat=Europe or cat=local)`

I am having trouble mixing the "and" and "or" efficiently... in get_posts.

For instance I can do something like:

$posts = get_posts(array( 'category__and' => array(1,10) ));  // assuming 10=category Europe, 1 =category 2016,

So I just do a loop like

Foreach $year in list of years:
  foreach $type in list of types
     get_posts(array( 'category__and' => array($year,$type) ));

Is there a more efficient way to combine my conditions?

Thanks

Answer 1

You could use a taxonomy query to make it cleaner and easier to read; I'm not sure if this would be any faster than the way you're doing it, though.

$args = array(
    'tax_query' => array(
        'relation' => 'AND',
        array(
            'taxonomy' => 'category',
            'field'    => 'name',
            'terms'    => array( 'Europe', 'local' ),
            'operator' => 'IN',
        ),
        array(
            'taxonomy' => 'category',
            'field'    => 'name',
            'terms'    => array( '2017', '2018' ),
            'operator' => 'IN',
        ),
    ),
    'per_page' => 10000,
);
$posts = get_posts( $args );

...should get you any posts (well, the first 10000 posts) that are in ( ( 2017 || 2018 ) && ( Europe || local ) ). (I think; the code is untested, so you may have to tweak it.)