Ever wanted to display the title of a post somewhere but limit the amount of characters that are shown? For instance, this post has a very long title, and if I were to use <?php echo the_title() ?> it would show as follows: Limit the characters that display on the_title.

That may not fit well on one line in lets say a widget or small width div. So here is a neat trick you can use:

<?php $title = the_title('','',FALSE); echo substr($title, 0, 11); ?>

Pretty simple huh, just note the bold numbers, in this case 11 character would output like this: Limit the c.

Thanks to Tattershall Way for this snippet.

Everything I have tried has led to nothing. And I have tried six way’s from Sunday to get my main posts to paginate.

example one:

<?php $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1; 
query_posts('offset=1&showposts=' . get_option('woo_other_entries') . '&cat=-' . $GLOBALS['ex_asides'] . '&paged=$paged' ); ?>

example two:

<?php 
global $myOffset; 
global $wp_query;
$myOffset = 1;
$paged = intval(get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
$temp = $wp_query;
$wp_query= null;
$wp_query = new WP_Query();
$wp_query->query(array(
	'offset' => $myOffset,
	'category__not_in' => array($GLOBALS['ex_asides'],7,84),
	'paged' => $paged,
	'showposts' => get_option('woo_other_entries'),
	)); ?>

example three:

<?php 
global $myOffset;
$myOffset = 1;
$wp_query = new WP_Query();
$wp_query->query(array(
	'offset' => $myOffset,
	'category__not_in' => array($GLOBALS['ex_asides'],7,84),
	'paged' => $paged,
	'showposts' => get_option('woo_other_entries'),
	)); ?>

And after those tries, I just can’t get more pages beyond the option’s that I choose, and can only pull an archive via the browse more link.

Any suggestions or anything?

In the last post “Creating a custom widget” I showed you how to create a custom widget. Well in this post I will show you how I used my custom widget to display all post with a certain custom field from outside the WordPress loop.

In the last post I used this tag:

<?php include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/includes/showcase.php'); ?>

Now I will show you what the file showcase.php has:

<ul>
<?php
global $wpdb;

$sql = "SELECT wposts.*
	FROM $wpdb->posts wposts, $wpdb->postmeta wpostmeta
	WHERE wposts.ID = wpostmeta.post_id
	AND wpostmeta.meta_key = 'gallery-url'
	AND wposts.post_status = 'publish'
	AND wposts.post_type = 'post'
	ORDER BY wposts.post_date DESC LIMIT 8";

$pageposts = $wpdb->get_results($sql, OBJECT);
$output = $pre_HTML;

foreach ($pageposts as $post) : setup_postdata($post);  ?>

<li><a href="<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "gallery-url", $single = true); ?>" title="Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">
<img src="<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "image", $single = true); ?>" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" /></a></li>

<?php endforeach; ?>

</ul>

That’s it! The most important item you may want to change for your own custom field is the line : AND wpostmeta.meta_key = 'gallery-url'. Where you would change the text in bold to match your own custom field value.

With his great advise I was able to figure out why all my attempts to use the query_post weren’t working. it came down to this line of code: <?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "gallery-url", $single = true); ?>, that was what I had in my code, and the $post->ID is the reason my code would not echo or print the custom field’s value. Solution? replace $post->ID with get_the_ID(). HA, so simple.