Wordpress: Random Posts Without a Plugin

If your Wordpress blog uses a home page or a landing page of some kind, featuring a random post on that page can serve a couple useful purposes. For one, it gives the reader an idea of what they can expect from your blog, especially if you make use of the Excerpt feature. Another benefit is that it helps keep your old archived posts visible. Normally people will only read the latest handful of posts, and ignore the rest. So this helps to open up the reader to even more of your valuable content.

I came across some plugins during my search, but I didn’t try any of them. I was just looking for a simple bit of code that would do the job. At first I didn’t think it would be that difficult; surely Wordpress has a random_post template tag, right? Well, they don’t. Everything I was finding required a plugin of some kind.

I happened across a post at RiteTurnOnly.com that had just what I was looking for. It requires a certain level of PHP knowledge, however – it involves adding a bit of code to The Loop.

A bare bones Loop for a page will look like this:

< ?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

Basically, it keeps checking to see if there are posts to display, depending on criteria. Then it assigns formatting code to each post that meets those criteria.

Well, this random post code that I found simply adds a query_posts function and some variables to this loop. It looks like this:

< ?php query_posts(array('orderby' => 'rand', 'category_name' => SomeCategoryName, 'showposts' => 1)); if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

When putting this into your own page code, all you have to do is change SomeCategoryName to whatever category you want to pull the random posts from. You can also change the showposts variable to however many random posts you want to show.

This will only retrieve the data – you still need to display the data. So after you start the loop, you’ll need to insert some formatting and template tags to get Wordpress to show what you want it to.

Once you’ve got that all figured out, just close the Loop:

< ?php endwhile; else: ?>

< ?php _e('Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.'); ?>

< ?php endif; ?>

This will probably take some tinkering on your part to get the output to display the way you want it to, but for ease of implementation, this Wordpress hack can’t be beat.

Thanks again, Len!

Tagged as: Blogging, customization, tutorial, wordpress