Brief background

Creating a slider is simple. For some. In WordPress there are a lot of ways to creating a post slider, image slider, category slider and just about any type of slider you could possibly imagine. The one I wanted to share is creating one with sticky posts. You know the ones that you have to pick from the slightly hidden options.

Make post sticky

Yeah. That little guy. The way WordPress handles sticky post is by putting them on the front page and keeping them on top regardless of when it was posted. A good example is the quick image I created to help illustrate.

The requirements

WordPress has plenty functions and plenty of ways of getting the required posts. One way of getting posts is using get_posts() but that isn’t the method I’ll be using. I’ll be using the WP_Query and alter it just a little bit. No, not with query_posts because that will just cause the world to implode. Okay, not really but there are several other reasons not to use that function.

The steps

In order to have a good functional featured post slider we first need to layout the steps needed. What I did initially was make a quick list of the steps.

  1. Get the posts
  2. Check if there are any ‘sticky’ posts
  3. If there are then run our code
  4. Ignore sticky posts in regular feed
  5. Drink up

The code

Now that we have our logic we can get started.

The first thing we have to do is get all the posts that are set to be sticky. We create and array to hold these.

$stickies = get_option( 'sticky_posts' );

We need to count how many posts there are and we’ll store that as a variable so we can use it later on.

$count = count( $stickies );

Now that we have an array and the total we can start a new query for only those posts. The way we do this is by creating a new WP_Query and passing some arguments. So we’ll create these arguments and name our newly created object of posts $featured. It can be whatever you want it to be. If you are submitting to the WordPress repo then prefix it with your theme or equivalent.

$args = array(
	'post__in'       => $stickies,
	'posts_per_page' => 3,
	'post_type'      => 'post',
	'nopaging'       => true
	);
$featured = new WP_Query( $args );

Now that we have our new object filled with posts we can run our code with the newly created query. But wait! When WordPress is first installed there are no sticky posts so then how do we check for that? Simple. Remember that we stored the value into a variable called $count? We’ll use that. We’ll use an if statement to run our code. If there are no posts then we’ll begin the newly created WordPress loop.

if ( $count > 0 ) {
  // run WordPress loop using $featured
}

Sounds simple now that we have it all together, right? Now we can create the loop and fill it with all the goodies and information we want using template tags. Don’t forget to use wp_reset_postdata() to reset our post data. There is one last thing we must do to get it all working right and that is hooking to pre_get_posts.

What?!

One more thing?

Yes, one last thing. I know a bit of a curveball but this is what will prevent the doubling of sticky posts. What we have to do is add just a few lines of code to our functions file of our theme.

add_action( 'pre_get_posts', 'my_awesome_theme_pre_posts' );
function my_awesome_theme_pre_posts( $query ){
    if ( is_home() ){
        $query->set( 'post__not_in', get_option( 'sticky_posts' ) );
    }

    return $query;
}

Now that we have that done we have our final code snippet:

// Create array of all the sticky_posts
$stickies = get_option( 'sticky_posts' );

// Count how many there are, if any
$count = count( $stickies );

// Create a set of arguments to pass
$args = array(
	'post__in'       => $stickies,
	'posts_per_page' => 3,
	'post_type'      => 'post',
	'nopaging'       => true
	);

$featured = new WP_Query( $args );

// If there is one or more sticky post we create our new slider
if ( $count > 0 ) : ?>
<section class="featured" id="featured-slider">
    <?php while( $featured->have_posts() ) : $featured->the_post(); ?>
    <article <?php post_class( 'featured' ); ?> id="post-< ?php the_ID(); ?>">
        <h1 class="featured-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
        <div class="content"><?php the_content(); ?></div>
        <div class="content"><?php wp_link_pages(); ?></div>
        <footer class="meta">Posted: <?php the_time( get_option( 'date_format' ) ); ?></footer>
    </article>
    <?php endwhile; wp_reset_postdata(); ?>
</section><!-- end of our featured article slider -->
<?php endif; // end the featured posts ?>

Enjoy

And done! For the most part since we need to add interaction but I’ll let you pick out what to use since there are plenty of jQuery slider plugins to help with that.


Comments

7 responses to “Creating a sticky post slider”

  1. Just a note, if anyone is having issues with the code for the functions.php file: there was an extraneous “s” added to the function name (function my_awesome_theme_pre_posts) instead of my_awesome_theme_pre_post as was called in the add_action.

    Cheers for the tut, very helpful!

    1. Thanks for catching that! Has been corrected now. 🙂 Glad it was helpful.

  2. HI I’m confused is this wrapped between php or how is it exactly work?

    1. Yes, using PHP. You can use it in any template file you want. You are creating a second loop of posts by using the WP_Query

  3. This is a nice tutorial. Often it does help if we make sticky posts in sliders. What could be the better WordPress slider plug-in for the code you’ve written?

    1. I actually didn’t have a WordPress slider plugin in mind. If anything just about any jQuery slider could work; all you would have to do is alter what is within the loop.