In the last few days, I’ve shown a few people a screenshot of something I’ve been working on for this site. The screenshot is of a home page displaying custom post types and not just the post post type. After numerous requests for the code to do this, I figured it’d be much easier to share it here.
WordPress version 3.0 will make creating custom post types extremely simple. But, the techniques I’ll point out in this tutorial can be used with previous versions of WordPress.
Changing the post type on the home page
By default, WordPress shows the post post type on your home page. Let’s suppose we want to show several post types in addition to posts:
page(yes, regular pages)albummoviequote
To add these, open your theme’s functions.php file and paste this PHP code into it:
add_filter( 'pre_get_posts', 'my_get_posts' );
function my_get_posts( $query ) {
if ( is_home() && $query->is_main_query() )
$query->set( 'post_type', array( 'post', 'page', 'album', 'movie', 'quote' ) );
return $query;
}That’s all there is to it.
Showing the post types in your feed
Realizing that many of you might want to also add these post types to your feed to match your blog, a small change in the code is required. All you need to do is change this line:
if ( is_home() && $query->is_main_query() )We’ll use the is_feed() conditional tag:
if ( ( is_home() && $query->is_main_query() ) || is_feed() )Now, you can have custom post types in your regular blog post rotation and your feed. Enjoy and look for more custom post type tutorials soon.
One thing I don’t really understand is how/where I select what post type I’m about to write in the backend. Particularly when we don’t have a UI for that yet.
I believe that the UI stuff is what’s coming in 3.0.
If you’re using the trunk version you can see the UI, but you have to register your post type first.
Just replace “movies” with whatever you want.
Ok. This makes sense. So there is no real way of using custom post types with 2.9.1
You can use them, but you’d have to do all the admin UI stuff and rewrite rules yourself. Basically, it’s too much of a pain to do.
I’ll be writing a complete tutorial on post types in 3.0 as soon as everything is ironed out with them in trunk.
Nice, can’t wait for your full tutorial when 3.0 is released.
I feel these will evolve into complete custom write panels, image the possibilities.
It’s difficult to be patient for all the features coming in 3.0! It’ll likely be the most revolutionary WordPress version yet and in all truth, it will subsequently become the defacto CMS throughout the world.
As Justin says, in addition to the code you still have to do the UI panel. Right now WP 3.0 trunk doesn’t display any UI even after registering post types.
I got this to work in the current trunk including the UI panel with a couple of simple additions to you code.
function post_type_movies()
{
register_post_type('movies', array('label'=>__('Movies'), 'public'=>true, 'show_ui'=>true, 'exclude_from_search'=>false));
register_taxonomy_for_object_type('post_tag', 'movies');
}
add_action('init', 'post_type_movies');
Wow.. great features, Can’t wait for WP 3.0
Great example! I’ve never used $query->set() before. I believe that you just opened up a whole new world for me. Thanks!
I actually end up using it a lot, at least in my support forums. So many people want to get rid of a category or just show a specific category on the home page. Of course, most tutorials around the Web tell them to use
query_posts()even though there’s a perfect filter hook for the job that keeps users out of theme templates.Can you talk more about how you use query set? I’m not sure I’m understanding how this keeps people out of the templates any more than query posts.
Hello! I am trying to make a three-column homepage, with a different category’s post displaying in each of the first two columns. I’m using your Query Posts plug-in, but can’t get the main content to disappear.
Is this ‘$query->set()’ the solution? I would so appreciate your advice. You’ve already helped me a ton with this, my infinite gratitude!
All my best
Kelly
Very useful information. Especially for a newbie like me. I will try to implement that on my blog. Thanks.
Wordpress 3.0 is coming? I don’t think I’ll upgrade that quickly when it comes out, maybe I’ll have to wait it out till 3.1 comes out.
It’ll be a while, but why would you wait? There’s some exciting things coming in 3.0.
Cool feature, but i think is better wait for the 3.0 version of WP, im not confident enough on messing on installation files.
I’m not sure if you misunderstood something from the post, but I’d never advocate changing installation files.
The tutorial deals with editing your theme’s
functions.php. The methods used above work in 2.9 and will be the same in 3.0.Hi, another use from this wordpress 3.0 . Very thankful to you for sharing.
I will try this one as soon as i get WP 3.0. A great stuff to help the bloggers. Really i need the code for that and you have provided it.
I can’t wait for Wordpress 3.0! I’ll be waiting for your tutorial.
Am I correct to assume that 3.0 will introduce new admin panels for custom post_types?
So in 3.0 if I create a custom post type ‘movies’ I will then have a new ‘movies’ choice in the admin panel where the user could input the information relevant to ‘movies’ only?
Right now with 2.9 I basically create new meta field boxes for the admin to fill in while writing a post. The problem comes into effect when I have ‘movies’ as a type of post, and say ‘music’ as a second type.
Right now in 2.9 both the meta input boxes show up in the ‘add article’ admin section, which makes it really confusing to the user. They have the ability to input information both for movies and music on the same ‘add article’ admin page.
This would indeed go a long ways into turning wp into more of a cms, where the author has a much clearer path as to where to input the data for each type of post…. boy I sure hope I am right.
How do custom posts jive with traditional taxonomies, such as categories and tags? If I queried a category, would all posts and (musics, et al) that have that category display?
I’m interested in this, I heard that they were adding the Categories and Tags taxonomies to Pages so, at least in my mind, it makes sense that they would apply to both. And I’m assuming that custom-post types would also be applicable, as long as you made sure they were registered for those taxonomies.
Which, if that is true then it makes sense that any custom taxonomies could also be registered across multiple custom post-types, as well as your posts and pages, if you desired as well..
Very exciting stuff.
nice feature, this is very useful for me.
Hi,
As you wrote, if I remove the ‘attachment’ type I’ll get the posts without the images. I would like to get the images without the posts but when I omit the ‘post’ type’, and leave onle the ‘attachment’ type, I get nothing.
Any idea?
I’ve just been playing around with this in WP 3.0 svn and so far so good. I can easily create a new post type, assign the default post features and custom taxonomies and get it all in a custom write panel. It’s also easy to create custom meta boxes linked to the new post type.
What I’m wondering about is:
1. How will adding custom fields to the custom post type be managed (one could just use the post custom fields but what if it’s a more complex post type that warrants its own DB table.)
2. I’d like to see an interface to also be able to add arbitrary custom fields to the Quick Edit part on the post list.
I guess what I want to be able to do is create custom front end functionality depending on the post type. For example:
Event Post Type
- display additional fields like event date, duration, venue, contact, etc…
- change the post sorting to use event start date or venue or any other additional field.
So basically my front end template will have different functionality than the default post type of ‘post’…
I guess I’m jumping ahead a bit here but just wanted to voice my thoughts
.
wow great post thanks for sharing with us
nice feature!
Totally helpful. Thanks a lot
I’ve problem..How do custom posts such as categories and tags?
Awesome tutorial, but what would I have to do if I wanted to query only one specific type in the sidebar? I tried your Query Posts widget to query all the items from a non-hierarchical category “song” and it’s impossible.
And how can I assure that a custom post type will be page-like? I was trying to get rid of some things in the display on “song” post type and make it output values of certain custom fields by making it a custom template and I realised that it’s not possible, because it’s post-like, not page-like. Would creating a template file song.php result in anything by default? I thought this is what add_post_type_support() could do but I have not seen any references to that yet.
I guess that I can’t wait for the rest of this series, as so many things are left unsaid and your and WP Engineer’s posts on this both left everyone curious.
We are going to kick-off a blog for our company. And, I’m curious as to why you chose WordPress over say TypePad or Blogger. What’s the advantage?
does this work with xampp? because i am using one i don’t if it will work.
Justin,
Nice post, thanks.
One thing though is that you example as written whacks out the new menu system since menu items are not custom post types. You should change it (I think) to
That works for me but there may be an even more robust way to handle it.
Thanks Mike. My menu vanished after a very long session and this was a life saver!
This solves it 100%
Actually this has now conflicted with something else. Is there a definative way of achieving this in WordPress 3.0 without loosing your custom menu?
Triying to achive this result, not on home but categories. im updating the code as i find out more, but still not working properly
now the wp_nav_menu only conflicts on the category page, everything else is showing normal
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/418330
Most usefull post, but still can’t wait for wp3.0
I also agree with Jason Pelker, WP will become defacto CMS and still be easy to host it anywhere.
This is very helpful. Thank you very much. Are you going to write a bit more about it?
One thing I noticed with using the Wordpress dev version is that the edit post/page title has changed. It probaby is constructed something like this: “Edit $post_type”.
This is bad, because it doesn’t take other more complex languages into account.
For example, both finnish and estonian have over a dozen of different cases, and this is one of the places where they are used.
For example, while editing a page, in estonian this would display “Muuda leht”, whereas it should be “Muuda lehte”.
What does it mean when you get: “Warning: Illegal offset type in isset or empty in /home/content/html/wordpress/wp-includes/query.php on line 1715″?
the thing I don’t understand is from a theme creation perspective how do we call these in a specific way. It seems like you did that in your screen shot but didn’t speak to it in the post.
Once again another solution, to save us a lot of extra editing…
Now if we could only sort out custom post_type archives that would be great.
Keep up the great work
I really need to create a new set of pages right now in a 2.92 site. But if I were on 3.0 already, I’d want to make them a custom post type instead. But I’m hearing this is 2 weeks out at least.
So…
In 3.0, can I convert a normal Page to a Custom Post Type? Likely not in Admin, so if it’s not, would I just be able to go into the database and change the post type field to the name of the custom post type, from “Page?”
Its ok, but WP 3.0 now in beta, on front page i see only 2,9,2?
nice. now how can I convince the Leviathan theme to show the byline before the post and the post-meta after the post for my custom post types just like it does for regular posts?
oh, just noticed that the settings for Hybrid recipe settings, recipe being my new custom post type, are not saved when saving a new recipe. any idea what could be wrong here?
Using wp 3.0 RC2 and your 0.8.1 beta hybrid theme + Leviathan
If I create a custom post, how can I filter my query to a specific category?
Let’s say a create a custom post type called ‘Music’ and I create 3 categories : ‘jazz’, ‘classical’ and rock. How can I only display the ‘jazz’ and ‘rock’ entries??
This’s not wok
query_posts('post_type=uslugi&cat=17,19'); ?I think this will work really good with the new wordpress 3.0. What do you think?
Hi!
This doesn’t seem to work anymore with the final release of 3.0. I don’t know why, but I get a syntax error (in dreamweaver cs5) when I paste this code inside.
I would like to have my CPT’s displayed in the main loop, just like this code snippet does, but for some reason it just doesn’t work anymore…
Any ideas on why?
This works great, but I’m running into a problem. Let’s say you use this to show every post type on your homepage. But in the sidebar, you want to list the last five posts of one particular post type. So you set up a get_posts loop with the post_type specified. It doesn’t work. $query->set overrides your get_posts argument and shows the last five of all post types. What would be the best way to circumvent this problem?
I had to change the post query just before the post loop. This allowed me to do exactly what you are trying to do. This also doesn’t break the WordPress menus. You can check it out at http://think2loud.com/?p=763
DId you find any solution to this? I’m struggling with the same problem.
It worked!
Although for some reason I had to make my post type plural in the code
I entered the code in functions.php
under function editoptions() {
.But It doesn’t make any changes for any site in my multisite network. Am I missing anything?
Thank you !
Just what I’ve been looking for but problem I have run in to a problem.
All my posts show on the home page page as I wish but I also have a gallery page which I would only like to display my gallery custom post types.
This is my code in page-gallery.php:
If I remove Justin’s code from my function.php then the only the gallery posts will be shown on the page but no on my home page.
Any idea’s? Or have I missed something?
Thanks
Where would you change
is_home()?Hi there Justin,
I have just started a new blog, and I am using a child theme for twentyten. I created two post types and noticed that they don’t show up at all. Even with a category assigned to them, they don’t show up in category page.
So I inserted the code you gave here in my function.php, and post types already show up in my homepage, but I get this error:
Warning: Illegal offset type in isset or empty in /home/magawork/public_html/criaturasblog/wp-includes/post.php on line 736
Warning: Illegal offset type in isset or empty in /home/magawork/public_html/criaturasblog/wp-includes/post.php on line 736
I have no idea what this means.
Can you help me please?
Hi Justin, thanks for this code. I don’t pretend to fully understand it, but I will try to implement this feature. I like the flexibility of adding post type to the blog page.
Im getting the same issue as Ivan.
I want to be able to show my custom Post types when i filter by category… Ivans code works but with nasty side effects
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/adding-custom-post-type-to-the-loop-wp-nav-menu-dissapears?replies=5#post-1645931
HELP!!!
I currently use this code, as per your example to show different custom post types on my home page.
can you help me change the code to exclude posts from a certain category from being displayed?
I had a question about the sample screen shot at the beginning of the post. How would you have wordpress show the custom post type before the title like you do here? Also how would you style that?
Brilliant! Just what I was looking for. Now I don’t need to bother writing custom wp-query and templates to display custom post types. It really pays to read the codex to find these gems.
Having some trouble using get_adjacent_post with a home page that includes multiple post types. It looks like get_adjacent_post breaks.
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/get_adjacent_post-does-seem-to-work-when-inluding-cpts-in-the-loop?replies=2
Is there a better way of getting previous and next post IDs from an index or archive template?
I’ve created a custom post type and a page using that type. In the reading options, I want to assign a static page made from this custom post type to be used as the home page, but there are only options for pages. Is there anyway to assign a page created with a custom post type to the home page?
i can’ t get page 2 of my category archives to load… all i get is a 404. See what i mean: http://spencerconstructioninc.com/wordpress/category/custom-home/page/2/
the category.php code looks like this:
help?
just tested and I see your page 2 !? how did you solve it? Just curios as I get a 500 server error when trying to view page 4
http://pacura.ru/page/4/ and I don’t have anything in my logfiles all I see is Premature end of script headers: index.php and )Connection reset by peer: mod_fcgid: read data from fastcgi server error
but to be honest I don’t see the relevance to this post here
This is the exact code in my
functions.phpfile:I don’t think it is related, just threw my comment in hoping the guy would give me some feedback. mine is:
and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that
Hi,
thank you for the article and to all commenters for their various input. A few points that may be relevant for others reading…
1)I think that one also needs to consider the possibility of people using multiple plugins with different post types, and so one should not just “set” the post types of the query as one filter would override the other.
One should fetch the posttypes set already for the query,
if none, then it is only querying posts, start the array with ‘posts’, else you will lose the posts when you “set” the rest.
then ADD your post types to what is already there?
2) There is a homepage js slider out in the wild that pulls in extra “pages” to the homepage. Not adding “pages” to a home page filter similar to above “broke” the homepage. But you may not want new pages appearing in a feed… so be careful what post types you add where… code may need to be more selective.
3) @Ovidiu, I gather is_post_type_archive() is a 3.1 feature only (not in 3.0.1?)
@anmari: sorry for not mentioning it, is_post_type_archive() comes from a plugin that offers a custom post types archive.
I Justin.
I’m using custom_post type and all it’s ok. Thank for your tutorials!
There is a problem about SEO. When a news custom_post_type change status to published all pings to service list are not performed. So i added this code in my function.php
Whit this code all ping are performed as well, but miss something… need to flush the feed. I noticed that when i publish a movies post type feed are not refreshed, it refresh only when i publish native post type.
Do you know how to do it?
Sorry for my bad english.
I found this ticket:
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/14922
bug fixed in 3.1 release
I’m using your code to add custom post types to my homepage. It works AWESOME, but when WordPress debug is set to true, it returns this notice:
Notice: Undefined index: suppress_filters in /functions.php on line 162
Is there a way to change the code to clean this up? It’s not a big deal, but I’m trying to clean up my code. Thx.
I got around this by doing this…
BEAUTIFUL. That worked perfectly! Thank you.
When I use this piece of code in WP 3.03, it displays perfectly on the homepage. But when I’m assigning a page template for the custom post type to a page is displays all the custom posts like on the homepage. Is there a way to suppress that function allowing the display of selected custom posts only on the homepage while the other pages display only the assigned page template?
Anyone
FYI Wordpress 3.1 will have built in templating to automatically create an index of custom post types at your ‘domain.com/slug’ of the custom post type. In case it helps.
You need to add
( ! is_admin() )to IF.In the context of this tutorial, it is not needed.
A longshot: do you know how to make a custom post type for which is_page() with return true?
I want the default handling of my custom post type to be the same as for Page rather than it be treated like a Post – but without having to modify the template (i.e. something the plugin which creates the custom post type can set).
Thanks,
Mark
It’s probably possible, but it would be incorrect.
is_page()is for thepagepost type. You should useis_singular( $post_type )for custom post type checks. Conditional tags have no bearing on how your post type behaves though.Hi Justin, do you have an answer for my query? See my post above.
Ben
Hi,
I really enjoyed this post and the codes works great on my home page.
However, I am facing this issue with custom post types;
I used tags for them but when I try to display tag pages, I keep getting not found, is there something I am missing here.
I use a child theme of Twentyten for my site.
Many thanks.
Hi Justin, I try this code on my website and it works fine. Thanks for sharing a good thing.
Great function. I need to be able to customize how my Custom Post type archive looks as the homepage. Is there a way to tell it to only display, for instance, The title and thumbnail with a link to the post?
Hello Justin. great post.
I had used your code on few of my websites.
There is one issue am facing and tried to loopup and study all code but till now no solution.
The pagination and everything works fine on my page which shows a list of custom post types (5 per page with next/previous links sorted by menu_order value).
However when I try same code on another page, which shows individual items from a custom post type, the data is displayed, but the next & previous posts links seem to be sorted based on date and not “menu_order” even after having the query correct.
Hi
The code works for my main page.
I have an Event custom post type. When I access ../events/
both posts+event posts are displayed.
I did an ugly fix and added
I rather filter on category but category is “”
Hi very interesting article. I have a problem to display the type of posts like on the screenshot. I want to display, if the post is a custom post, the post type name and then the title. Can anyone help me?
Hey Mark,
for example you can ask in the loop of your index.php what type the post is and if the post is a custom post type you can display your custom name:
Another way is to display the singular name of the custom post type:
I hope I could help you
I think I made a mistake. The code was not displayed correctly. The right codes snippets are:
To ask in the loop if your post is a custom post and display a custom name:
To display the singular name of the custom post type:
You have to paste it in the loop at your index.php. I hope this time it displays it correctly.
What I don’t get is that for a homepage you would want
http://www.mysite.com
But in custom post types you have to create a slug or use the default. So a custom home page post type would only allow something like http://www.mysite.com/home?
Is that correct?
Could you use a custom post type as static page for your home page with this?
I have a website where several pages show the loop, but depending on the page, only one kind of post is shown (e.g. in the “Issues” page, only the ‘issues’ custom post types show).
In this example, “is_home()” is used in an if-statement to test if you’re in the homepage right?
Could I use a similar method to do what I mentioned above? Or is there a simpler way to do it?
Great! Exactly what I was looking for!
@adrien yes you can do that, use is_category() or is_page() or something similar along with get_queried_object to find the category or page id and decide which post types to display.
This code comes into conflict with bbPress. Only on the homepage, the code makes the custom post types are listed in the list of forums (widget).
This means that the widget you’re using isn’t properly setting the
suppress_filtersargument.Thanks!
What would be the correct argument for suppress_filter?
How to put the post types in the native Wordpress widgets to recent topics or latest topics.
Ditto. How do you get them to show up in the Recent Posts and Archives widgets?
You’d want to set
suppress_filterstotrue.I still do not understand. The problem is with the bbpress widget, the homepage or with the theme?
I couldn’t get that to work. The code was conflicting with my navigation menus and the jQuery Cycle slider plugin. I found a fix that suggested adding ‘nav_menu_item’ to the post types but that created another bug where a number of untitled posts showed up with numbers in place of the title and broken links. This is the only configuration that didn’t conflict with anything:
http://pastebin.com/J3j9HfZ2
It adds custom post types to the main loops on the home page, and then on all archive pages with is_archive() which takes care of category and tag pages also.
The Recent Posts widget is fixed on those pages, but not sitewide such as on single post pages, and the Archives widget still doesn’t include the other post type on any page. Unless there’s another solution I’ll have to hardcode those with custom queries in my theme.
Hey, I am really interested in using this, and was able to get it setup for cars, (make, model, year, etc.), but now how do I get it to display on a page? I am building a website for a car lot, and need to be able to add the car details through the post types, and then have each car print out on the page with the custom post types I added. I know this is probably a silly question, but I am just not used to custom post types, and I know they have a lot of power.
Thanks.
How can I display custom meta date on a page that displays a custom post type?
I mean data
Okay, Actually I mean custom field data. I am getting frustrated.
if I changed ‘if ( is_home()..’ to ‘if (is_page(144)…’.
it’s not working?
OK folks. If you’re having trouble getting Justin’s code to play nicely with your navigation menus.
The following is the only solution I found that allowed me to use the code Justin provided here without either a) wiping out navigation menu items, or b) including navigation menu items but then having the menu items show up as though they were posts (which, let me tell you, looks extremely stupid)…neither of which is at all an acceptable solution.
Steps:
1) Follow Justin’s directions to include the custom post types on your homepage.
2) To get the navigation menu items to reappear:
As some others have suggested, add ‘nav_menu_item’ to your array of custom post types in the code Justin has provided.
3) To prevent navigation menu items from also appearing within the loop as if they are posts:
Just inside of the loop, add an if statement to exclude the nav_menu_item post type.
For example, at the beginning of the loop:
and at the end of the loop:
Hope this is helpful to someone.
I screwed up the code tags in my previous reply, thus mangling my entire purpose for posting! I’ll just paste it as normal text here, forgive me.
At the beginning of the loop:
At the end of the loop:
Oh for God’s sake, I solved the problem but now I cannot post a simple comment without half of it disappearing. Such has been my day. One last try here lest I screw things up for folks more than they already were.
and at the end of the loop,
(plus of course add closing php tag but I think that was causing my code to get stripped out, so I omitted it here).
Holly Thanks! Yours is the best of all of the code I’ve tried. It still breaks the recent posts widget but I can live with that for now.
If i have 2 custom post types like Movies and Series
What is the solution for this script ?
I am looking for a simple way (short code ?) to list all of the “Article” post type on my site in a regular blog post. Reason being that I am using the Onswipe iPad plugin and it only shows regular posts, not pages or other post types. I would like to at least be able to show the list of Articles on the site to iPad viewers.
Hello!
Excellent tutorial, exactly what I searched for. With several tweaks to the if statement I got desired results.
Thanks!
Justin, thank you for your tutorial. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to get my one little Custom Post Type to show up on the front page of my blog and if it weren’t for you and Otto, I’d still be chasing my tail. I appreciate the clarity.