Only the_excerpt seems to return anything - php

Question

When producing a front page of a website and trying to grab five excerpts from the wordpress database it produces the excerpt, no problem, but it completely ignores my the_title, get_the_id and the_date:
foreach( $post as $posts) : setup_postdata($posts);
echo "<hr><h1>" . the_title( false, false, false ) . "</h1>";
echo the_excerpt( ) . "<br />";
echo "<a href='./index.php?p=" . get_the_ID( ) . "'><font color='white'>Read More...</font></a><br />";
echo "Published on: " . the_date( false, false, false, false );
endforeach;
Which produces the output:
http://i.stack.imgur.com/JNkxh.png
And as such, the 'Read More...' is directed to './index.php?p='
I have defined the get_posts statement as follows:
$args = array(
'posts_per_page' => 5,
'numberposts' => 5,
'offset' => 0,
'category' => $c,
'order_by' => 'post_date',
'order' => 'DESC',
'include' => '',
'exclude' => '',
'meta_key' => '',
'meta_value' => '',
'post_type' => 'post',
'post_mime_type' => '',
'post_parent' => '',
'post_status' => 'publish',
'suppress_filters' => true );
$post = get_posts( $args );
Any ideas on what went wrong would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

I think the problem lies with setup_postdata function.
Quote from setup_postdata Codex Page:
Important: You must make use the global $post variable to pass the
post details into this function, otherwise functions like the_title()
don't work properly...
Example from that Codex page:
global $post;
// Assign your post details to $post (& not any other variable name!!!!)
$post = $post_object;
setup_postdata( $post );
...
So try renaming $post to $mypost and then use exact $post variable in the setup_postdata() like this:
foreach( $mypost as $post) : setup_postdata($post);