Create WordPress Page Templates with Custom Queries

One of my main goals with the redesign was to make it easier for visitors to find the information that was most popular on my site. Not to my surprise, posts about MooTools, jQuery, and CSS were at the top of the list. What do those three topics have in common? The fact that I provide a sweet demo for each of them. Thus I set out to create an easy way to check out all of my demos -- the Demos & Downloads page.

I could address my Demos and Downloads link to "/index.php?s=view+demo" but that's ugly -- not SEO friendly nor is it an address anyone will remember. The solution was to create a new page template that would act similar to a search results page but afford me much more flexibility.

The Strategy

The first step was to identify posts that had a demo. If I were starting my blog today I would add a custom field called "demo" and give all posts containing a demo a value of "1". The issue is that I have 2 years worth of posts and no desire to add a custom field to all of those posts that contain demos. I do know, however, that the label of all of my demos is "View Demo" so any post containing that string would likely contain a demo. Problem solved: I will need a search parameter for my custom query that looks for the "view demo" string.

WP_Query

WP_Query is WordPress' awesome database interaction class. WP_Query accepts dozens of helpful parameters in the form of a request string or an array to grab the posts you need (writing raw MySQL statements sucks). With my strategy mapped out and WP_Query researched, it was GO time.

The Page Template PHP

<?php
/*
Template Name: Demos and Downloads
*/

/* helper:  does regex */
function get_content_match($regex,$content) {
	preg_match($regex,$content,$matches);
	return $matches[1];
}

/* list of "view demo" posts */
$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? (int) get_query_var('paged') : 1;
$demoPosts = new WP_Query('s=view+demo&showposts=10&order=desc&post_status=publish&paged='.$paged);

?>
<?php get_header(); ?>

<h1>Demos & Downloads</h1>

<?php while ($demoPosts->have_posts()) : $demoPosts->the_post(); ?>
<?php 
	$content = get_the_content();
	if(strstr(strtolower($content),'href="https://davidwalsh.name/demo/')):
?>
	<h1><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(''); ?></a></h1>
	<p style="padding-bottom:3px;padding-left:5px;">
	<?php
		$intro = get_content_match('/<p>(.*)<\/p>/isU',$content);
		$image = get_content_match('/src="(.*)" class="image"/isU',$content);
		$link = strip_tags(get_content_match('/href="http:\/\/davidwalsh.name\/demo\/(.*)">/isU',$content));
		if($image) { echo '<img src="'.$image.'" class="image" alt="Tutorial Demo" />'; }
		echo $intro;
	?>
	</p>
	<div class="demo-actions">
		<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" class="conred">Continue Reading »</a>
		<a href="https://davidwalsh.name/demo/<?php echo $link; ?>" class="demo">View Demo</a>
	</div>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>

<div class="next-prev-links no-print">
	<div class="nav-left">
		<a href="/demos/page/<?php echo $paged + 1; ?>">« Older Posts</a>
	</div>
	<?php if($paged != 1): ?>
	<div class="nav-right">
		<a href="/demos/page/<?php echo $paged - 1; ?>">Newer posts »</a>
	</div>
	<?php endif; ?>
	<div class="clear"></div>
</div>

<!-- <?php trackback_rdf(); ?> -->
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Notice that in order to use pagination within the demos section, I needed to set my own $paged variable and add it to the WP_Query parameters string. The other parameters should be self explanatory.

Once I had the posts for the page, I'd cycle throw each post and use some custom PHP (which you couldn't easily do on the search page) to parse the post content to and pull out a supporting image and link to the demo. The result is my Demos and Downloads page.

Beautiful! Don't be afraid to create custom page templates with content generated from your own custom queries. Have any other pages that you think would make the site better? Let me know!