Interrogate a page within a loop to check template type or custom meta data (Pages vs Posts)

Question

I've spent a few days researching working with WP static pages - as separate from posts.

Although I've found useful guidance, I can't seem to find any good tutorials or worked examples that show me how to work with pages using a modified WordPress Loop that will enable me to filter on specific page criteria and extract relevant content.

I am creating a site that will be used annually for events. I want to have a page type (or custom post type) for Calls to Action. My expectation is that there will only ever be a limited number of call to action pages: typically only a few, and likely to be no more than 10 for the site.

I'd like the home page to list a summary of the content on these pages, and build that using a loop: but I want to filter this loop by both the specific page content type (e.g. CallToAction), as well as a status indicator, such as "sticky" or active.

I'd like to either interrogate the page by its template, or use some other indicator such as a custom field that I check.

Being able to set the desired order of the content pages, and sorting their appearance by that order is also a requirement, and I'd like these pages to be shown in the site menu: probably under a parent menu of Calls To Action.

Due to the limited number of pages and the relatively static nature of them, static pages feel like a good approach, however my reading so far indicates that what I want to do with the loop control could be challenging, maybe impossible.

My main question is can I interrogate a page to find out about template type or custom meta data within a loop?

A custom post type seems like a solution that will work, but having a separate post type seems overkill.

Suggestions?

[Edited 14 May 2013 to simplify/ clarify]

Answer 1

I would create an "Events" custom post type and then create a "Call to Action" custom taxonomy and associate this taxonomy with the custom post type.

This way you can have an unlimited amount of events which can be associated with taxonomy terms (your Call to Action). This makes much more sense since you project that you will have few Call to Action types (or terms).

You can the query posts by post type as well as taxonomy, additionally you can also query by meta key (should you attach custom fields to your post type for more definition).

Focus your attention on this Codex page here:

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

...to learn more about how to query posts, by type, taxonomy and meta; not to mention much more.

Here is an example of setting up a basic query to query by your specified post type and taxonomy.

$args = array(
    'post_type' => 'events', //this is a custom post type
    'tax_query' => array(
        array(
            'taxonomy' => 'calltoaction', //this is a custom taxonomy
            'field' => 'slug',
            'terms' => 'somecalltoactionterm' //a term within your taxonomy
        )
    )
);
$query = new WP_Query( $args );

You could set these parameters dynamically through a form using $_GET if you wanted to create a filter that responded to a user changing values in say a dropdown menu or via checkboxes for examples.

Relevant reading:

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Custom_Post_Types
• http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/register_post_type
• http://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies
• http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/register_taxonomy

Answer 2

@userabuser's input provides a useful discussion on using Custom Post Types to solve the customisation need. However, this still left unanswered my main question:

Can I interrogate a pages template type or custom meta data within a loop?

I wanted to use wordpress static pages with a custom template as an alternative to Custom Post Types. For the small number of pages involved in this case, Custom Post Types really seem like overkill, and clutter up the WordPress menu with the extra custom type entries.

I ended up answering this part of my question, and it turned out to be fairly simple to do:

I created a new calls-to-action.php file to process the pages, and a pages_call-to-action.php template file:

<?php

$callstoaction = get_pages(array(
    'meta_key' => '_wp_page_template',
    'meta_value' => 'page_call-to-action.php',
    'post_status' => 'publish,private',
    'hierarchical' => 0,
    'sort_column' => 'menu_order',
    'sort_order' => 'ASC'

);
?>

followed by a loop as follows:

<?php foreach($callstoaction as $i => $calltoaction) : ?>

     // Do some stuff

<?php endforeach; ?>

Note the meta_key and meta_value pair that identify the template attribute of the page.

This enables you to create standard wordpress pages, set their template through the standard wordpress UI to be "Call To Action" (page_call-to-action.php), and then be able to handle them specifically in a page processing loop as I described above, avoiding the need for a custom post type.

For reference, here's the Template file:

<?php
/**
 * Template Name: Call To Action
 * Description: Provides a basic template for call-to-action pages.
 */

get_header(); the_post(); ?>

<div id="staticpage-single" <?php post_class() ?>>
     // template layout goes here
</div>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

The only real downside I've seen so far in considering templated static pages vs Custom Post Types is that wordpress static pages "are not included in your site's feed" (as noted in the Codex link below), however Hesham Zebida notes (see link below) that there is a "rss-includes-pages" plugin available to address that problem :)

See also:

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages (for a more detailed discussion of the differences.)
• http://www.famousbloggers.net/posts-vs-pages.html (for the rss-includes-pages comment and a discussion about SEO.)