Query category posts with Twig and WordPress

Question

I've inherited a WordPress Twig site and am trying to modify an existing shortcode that is used in pages to output blog posts for a blog page and for single category post pages.

These shortcodes do the obvious:

[blog_list category_exclude="in-the-news"] is used on the "Blog" page, excluding the In The News category with category_exclude.

[blog_list category="in-the-news"] is used on the In The News posts page for that one category with category.

I have added another category, i.e. videos, and this works for a video posts category page:

[blog_list category="videos"]

But what I need to do is exclude more than one category on the Blog page using category_exclude, like this:

[blog_list category_exclude="in-the-news videos"]

That doesn't work, and so I know I need to modify query_posts for the if loop below that determines the category to exclude. How to I make the category_exclude parameter use more than one argument?

This is the complete shortcode function:

add_shortcode('blog_list', 'blog_get_list');


function blog_get_list($params) {
    global $paged;
    $blog_posts = [];

    if (!isset($paged) || !$paged){
        $paged = 1;
    }

    $page_size = 20;

    $context = Timber::get_context();

    if (!empty($params['page_size'])) {
        $page_size = $params['page_size'];
    }

    $args = array(
        'post_type' => 'post',
        'posts_per_page' => $page_size,
        'paged' => $paged,
        'orderby' => 'date',
        'order' => 'DESC',
        'post_status' => 'publish'
    );

    if (!empty($params['category'])) {
        $args['tax_query'] = array(
            array(
                'taxonomy' => 'category',
                'terms' => explode(',', $params['category']),
                'field' => 'slug',
                'operator' => 'IN',
            ),
        );
    }

    if (!empty($params['category_exclude'])) {  // Exclude categories
        $args['tax_query'] = array(
            array(
                'taxonomy' => 'category',
                'terms' => explode(',', $params['category_exclude']),
                'field' => 'slug',
                'operator' => 'NOT IN',
            ),
        );
    }

    query_posts($args);

    $posts = Timber::get_posts();

    foreach ($posts as $p) {
        $blog_posts[] = acco_blog_get_single($p);
    }

    $context['blog_posts'] = $blog_posts;
    $context['pagination'] = Timber::get_pagination();


    return Timber::compile('blog/index.twig', $context);
}

function acco_blog_get_single($post) {
    $blog_post = [
        'id' => $post->ID,
        'link' => $post->link,
        'title' => $post->title(),
        'author_name' => $post->author_name,
        'date' => $post->post_date,
        'summary' => $post->get_field('summary'),
        'body' => $post->get_field('body')
    ];


    $feature_image = $post->get_image('feature_image');
    if ($feature_image->ID){
        $blog_post['feature_image'] = $feature_image;
    }

    return $blog_post;
}

Syntactic Fructose Syntactic Fructose · Accepted Answer · 2018-03-05T19:09:42

According to the code above, you'll need to simply specify a comma delimited list of categories to exclude:

[blog_list category_exclude="in-the-news videos"]

Should be changed to

[blog_list category_exclude="in-the-news,videos"]

This is because in the code above, it explodes the category_exclude string into an array, split where any commas are found:

if (!empty($params['category_exclude'])) {  // Exclude categories
    $args['tax_query'] = array(
        array(
            'taxonomy' => 'category',
            'terms' => explode(',', $params['category_exclude']), // "cat1,cat2" would become ["cat1","cat2"] here
            'field' => 'slug',
            'operator' => 'NOT IN',
        ),
    );
}

Query category posts with Twig and WordPress

1 Answers