Why does this query not SELECT post IDs like a normal query would?

Question

1. I have a page template, call it page-myblog.php, that I want to display an ordinary loop on.
2. I have created a page 'myblog' in the admin area and it crops up as normal on the front end.
3. I want to show all my blog posts in the loop on that page template. I refuse to instantiate a new WP_Query on the page and I want to edit the main query instead.

This appraoch has not worked thanks to the following behaviour:

add_action( 'pre_get_posts', function( $query ) {
    if( $query->query['pagename'] === 'myblog' ) {
        $query->set( 'pagename', null );
        $query->set( 'post_type', 'post' );
    }
});

results in the following SQL being generated.

SELECT   wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts  WHERE 1=1  AND wp_posts.post_type = 'post'  ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC 

This query works, which is to say, it does find posts if you run it in an SQL console, but because it doesn't explicitly select IDs (I think?) there's nothing in my $query->posts array.

Why does this happen? And can I fix it?

Answer 1

I'm not sure why you don't want to use wp_Query? wp_Query is a very powerful function about retrieving various queries. First of all, pages in the blog do not relate with posts, so you won't get any predefined post query for that page-template that you created.

However there are a few ways to show post in your static page with custom query (eg. query_posts, get_posts, wp_Query).

In this case, if you don't want to use wp_Query. Please try with query_posts. As far as I understand you just want to retrieve original post type which is 'post'. not the custom post types. am I right?

Pls try this following code in your page-myblog.php and pls make sure you are using that template for that page.

<?php
$args = array(
     'post_type'      => 'post',
     'posts_per_page' => 5,
     'order'          => ASC
);
// The Query
query_posts( $args );

// The Loop
while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
   echo '<li>';
   the_title();
   echo '</li>';
endwhile; ?>

// Reset Query wp_reset_query(); ?>

I hope this would help your problem. If you want to know more about query_posts please follow the given link. Good luck! http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/query_posts