It's time to learn about WP_Query
Posted: Thu Jan 02, 2025 9:09 am
Whether it is the homepage, a single post or the product page of your eCommerce, WordPress uses its Loop to build the structure of the page (thanks to specific PHP files) and populate it with the appropriate content (connecting to the database).
This solution is perfect because in most cases we don't even have to worry about how WordPress creates these pages, most of the time the Loop that is used responds to our needs but as good developers we know that sometimes requests arise that push us to have to customize this behavior.
We have seen that over the years WordPress has shared several functions that allowed us to create custom Loops, functions that fortunately nowadays are slowly being abandoned and algeria phone number data used only in the specific use cases for which they were created.
Using a PHP class that generates an object ready to be queried allows us to do many interesting things, but above all it allows us to simplify our code!
And it's about simplification that I want to talk about, initializing a WP_Query object is as simple as declaring an array:
PHP
1
//Initialize WP_Query object
2
$loop = new WP_Query ( array ( 'cat' => 3 ) );
The syntax new WP_Query()is the one that in PHP allows us to initialize an object of the WP_Query class, but the interesting thing is the parameters that are passed inside it. In the example presented above the configuration array is passed directly inside the round brackets, this will allow us to pass it directly to the class constructor and initialize the object.
I was able to do this because the previous array is very simple and my goal was to show you how to initialize the object, but generally when we talk about WP_Query and Loop configurations we are faced with a syntax like this:
This solution is perfect because in most cases we don't even have to worry about how WordPress creates these pages, most of the time the Loop that is used responds to our needs but as good developers we know that sometimes requests arise that push us to have to customize this behavior.
We have seen that over the years WordPress has shared several functions that allowed us to create custom Loops, functions that fortunately nowadays are slowly being abandoned and algeria phone number data used only in the specific use cases for which they were created.
Using a PHP class that generates an object ready to be queried allows us to do many interesting things, but above all it allows us to simplify our code!
And it's about simplification that I want to talk about, initializing a WP_Query object is as simple as declaring an array:
PHP
1
//Initialize WP_Query object
2
$loop = new WP_Query ( array ( 'cat' => 3 ) );
The syntax new WP_Query()is the one that in PHP allows us to initialize an object of the WP_Query class, but the interesting thing is the parameters that are passed inside it. In the example presented above the configuration array is passed directly inside the round brackets, this will allow us to pass it directly to the class constructor and initialize the object.
I was able to do this because the previous array is very simple and my goal was to show you how to initialize the object, but generally when we talk about WP_Query and Loop configurations we are faced with a syntax like this: