How do I get wordpress to override a previous posts query? - php

Question

I've got a page that has a category list at the top, and should normally list posts below it. The category list is created using:
<?php $display_categories = array( 4, 7, 8, 9, 21, 1); $i = 1;
foreach ( $display_categories as $category ) { ?>
<div>
<?php single_cat_title(); ?> //etc
</div>
<?php }
?>
However, this seems to make the post loop order posts by category. I want it to ignore category ordering and order by date in descending order. I've created a new WP_Query since according to the docs you can't use query_posts() twice, so just in case.
<?php $q = new WP_Query( "cat=-1&showposts=15&orderby=date&order=DESC" );
if ( $q->have_posts() ) :
while ( $q->have_posts() ) : $q->the_post(); ?>
the_title(); // etc
endwhile;
endif;
?>
However, this still seems to be ordered by category (the same order as the list above) and then by date, as opposed to just by date.

Answer 1

I've had problems with this before as well.
Try this:
<?php
global $post;
$myposts = get_posts( 'numberposts=5' );
foreach( $myposts as $post ) : setup_postdata( $post ); ?>
<div <?php post_class(); ?>>
<div class="title">
<h2>
<?php the_title(); ?>
</h2>
<p class="small"><?php the_time( 'F j, Y' ); ?> by <?php the_author(); ?></p>
</div>
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
</div>
<?php endforeach;
?>
The important line is global $post;.
That should reset your global query. The setup_postdata($post) method is necessary to give you access to functions like the_author() or the_content().
-Chris

Answer 2

I don't have any experience with wordpress, but a couple of possibilities:
You define the "order" parameter twice in the string you're calling query_posts() with, I don't know if that causes a problem or not.
As well, "show" is not a valid parameter, you may have been looking for "showposts".
Parameters and their effects are described here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts#Parameters

Answer 3

query_posts is finicky sometimes. Try something like this and see if it works:
query_posts(array('category__not_in'=>array(1),
'showposts'=>15,
'orderby'=>date,
'order'=>DESC));
Since that's not the issue, try adding update_post_caches($posts) to the second loop, like this:
<?php $q = new WP_Query("cat=-1&showposts=15&orderby=date&order=DESC");
if ( $q->have_posts() ) : while ( $q->have_posts() ) : $q->the_post(); update_post_caches($posts); ?>
the_title(); // etc
endwhile; endif; ?>
Supposedly this solves some plugin problems.