Description:
WordPress query_posts() function is pretty powerful, and easy to read out. However, you need to know what you’re querying for, as very often the results are not the expected ones.
Solution:
Take care of pagination. For regular queries, you don’t need that impediment, and somehow WordPress does it on it’s own. How to avoid it? Add a huge number of posts_per_page to the arguments array:
$args['posts_per_page' ] = 99999;
You need to exclude tags fast, based only on the slug? Nothing simpler:
$args['tag__not_in'] = array(get_term_by(‘slug’, TAG_1, ‘post_tag’)->term_id, get_term_by(‘slug’, TAG_2, ‘post_tag’)->term_id, get_term_by(‘slug’, TAG_3, ‘post_tag’)->term_id);
You can find out an id of a term very easy like this. Works as well for categories:
$categoryId = get_term_by(‘slug’, CATEGORY_SLUG, ‘category’)->term_id;
You can calculate the number of valid posts you are actually displaying by your rules by combining the arguments:
$args=array(
‘tag__not_in’ => array(get_term_by(‘slug’, TAG_1, ‘post_tag’)->term_id, get_term_by(‘slug’, TAG_2, ‘post_tag’)->term_id),
‘post_type’ => ‘post’,
‘post_status’ => ‘publish’,
‘category_name’ => CATEGORY_SLUG,
‘posts_per_page’ => 99999,
);$nrOfPostsInCategory = count(query_posts($args));
This actually returns the number of published posts in a category, without the ones that have the excluded tags. This comes in useful when you want to use functional tags, that aid your code or they way you use some posts.
