HOWTO: Query WordPress posts in CMS Made Simple

Filed under: Blog — krkhan @ 3:53 pm

While I run my blog at inspirated.com, I aggregate posts related to coding at the subdomain code.inspirated.com. The websites are run through WordPress and CMS Made Simple respectively.

For the latter, I needed to find a way of fetching blog posts from the main site for linking. Initially, I used tag feeds for this purpose. That is, I used the RSS module for CMS-MS and fetched the feed for a particular tag (e.g., inspirated.com/tag/code/feed). This worked well for a while until the feeds became large and I noticed that only the most recent 10 posts were showing up in the listings.

Digging around, I found this piece of documentation which explains how one can use custom queries for collecting WordPress posts from a blog. There was a catch however as the code for doing so could only be run globally. In other words, if I tried running the code mentioned on the page inside a User Defined Tag in CMS-MS I would get strange errors.

The solution was to run the code in a separate PHP file. Here’s how:

Create a file named wp.php in your CMS-MS folder with the following code:

<?php
require_once('/path/to/wordpress/wp-blog-header.php');
// edit the path in the line above to point to your wp-blog-header.php
 
$tag = isset($_REQUEST['--tag']) ? $_REQUEST['--tag'] : 'code';
$count = isset($_REQUEST['--count']) ? $_REQUEST['--count'] : '-1';
$after = isset($_REQUEST['--after']) ? $_REQUEST['--after'] : '1970-01-01';
 
function filter_where($where = '') {
    global $after;
    $where .= " AND post_date >= '".$after."'";
    return $where;
}
add_filter('posts_where', 'filter_where');
 
query_posts('tag='.$tag.'&posts_per_page='.$count);
 
echo "<ul>";
if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
    echo "<li>";
    echo "<a href=\"";
    echo the_permalink();
    echo "\">";
    echo the_title();
    echo "</a>";
    echo " (";
    echo the_time('F jS, Y');
    echo ")";
    echo "</li>\n";
endwhile; else:
    echo "<li>No posts found</li>\n";
endif;
echo "</ul>";
 
wp_reset_query();
?>

Add a User Defined Tag in CMS-MS with the following code:

$path = 'whoami | php -q /path/to/wp.php';
// edit the path in the line above to point to the wp.php created in previous step
 
// whoami command piped for no reason because my script wasn't
// producing any output without it
 
if(isset($params['tag'])) {
    $path .= ' --tag='.$params['tag'];
}
 
 
if(isset($params['count'])) {
    $path .= ' --count='.$params['count'];
}
 
if(isset($params['after'])) {
    $path .= ' --after='.$params['after'];
}
 
echo `$path`;

Use the tag in any CMS-MS page with any of the following combinations:
- List all posts with the tag code:
  {wp_posts_with_tag tag="code"}
  {wp_posts_with_tag tag="code"}
- List 10 posts with the tag code:
  {wp_posts_with_tag tag="code" count="10"}
  {wp_posts_with_tag tag="code" count="10"}
- List all posts with the tag code after May 1st, 2009:
  {wp_posts_with_tag tag="code" after="2009-05-01"}
  {wp_posts_with_tag tag="code" after="2009-05-01"}

Custom queries are very powerful once you get them working. Anyone planning on using them should take a look at the function reference for getting to grips with the flexibility they offer.

Tags: CMS Made Simple, Code, Flag 42, PHP, WordPress, Workaround

Comments (2)

Inspirated

HOWTO: Query WordPress posts in CMS Made Simple

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