How to increment posts within a specific category - php

Question

I am returning all posts on the page. Every six posts I want to incrementally show a post from a specific category. Every time this comes to pass I would like to increment up in the loop so there are no repeats of the same post within that specific category on the page.
I've successfully gotten the posts from that category showing on every sixth post on the page. I am just unable to get the loop to work so that it shows incrementally the next post in the category on every sixth spot on the page. Currently it just shows the same first post in the array.
<?php while ($query->have_posts()) {
if( $query -> post_count > 0 ) {
$postnum = 0;
foreach( $query -> posts as $post ) {
$postnum++;
if( $postnum%5 == 0 ) {
$args = array( 'cat' => 1824, 'posts_per_page' => 1, );
query_posts( $args );
$current_post = 0;
while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
$current_post++;
echo "CTA Card Specific Info";
endwhile;
}
$query->the_post();
?>```

Answer 1

Instead of using query_posts(), you could nest anther WP_Query inside the first and use the offset parameter to skip over the posts you've already output. I haven't tested this code, but something like the following could work:
$post_count = 0;
$category_count = 0; // for determining offset
$args = array(
'post_type' => 'post',
'posts_per_page' => -1,
'category__not_in' => 1824, // or something like this to prevent duplicates
);
$post_query = new WP_Query ( $args );
if ( $post_query->have_posts() ) {
while ( $post_query->have_posts() ) : $post_query->the_post();
$post_count++;
echo "Regular Post Here";
if ( $post_count % 6 === 0 ) {
$args = array(
'cat' => 1824,
'posts_per_page' => 1,
'offset' => $category_count,
);
$category_query = new WP_Query( $args );
$category_count++;
if ( $category_query->have_posts() ) {
while ( $category_query->have_posts() ) : $category_query->the_post();
echo "CTA Card Specific Info";
endwhile; $post_query->reset_postdata();
}
}
endwhile;
}
Once you've finished with the inside loop, make sure you call reset_postdata() to change the context of the query back to the main query.
It's also worth noting that using offset can mess up your pagination. I don't think that will come into play here, but if you notice pagination issues that could be the culprit.