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Hi Tom,

I ended up deciding to stick with WP Show Posts and for now, to just manually specify the Post IDs via the shortcode, ie: [wp_show_posts id="119" settings="post_id=186,328,222"]

I’m just wondering – do you have any opinion as to whether this approach would be better/worse from a performance standpoint, as opposed to the other approach of specifying the category and tag for each? I might have 10 of these lists on one page, so would love to do this in the most optimum way.

Also, is there any caching mechanism built in that can be leveraged or any advice you have there? We are expecting huge traffic spikes to this site, and these posts do not need to change often, so just looking to be as smart as we can when it comes to how we do this.

Thank you.

Basically on the homepage, for each List, I’m just specifying that the tag equals “homepage” and then whatever the category is. For the category pages, I think I”ll be specifying that the tag equals “featured” and then whatever the sub-category of that category is that I want to pull from.

So homepage, might be:
List 1: tag=homepage, cat=1
List 2: tag=homepage, cat=2
List 1: tag=homepage, cat=3
List 2: tag=homepage, cat=4
etc

Then a category might look like:
List 1: tag=featured, cat=12
List 2: tag=featured, cat=13
List 1: tag=featured, cat=14
List 2: tag=featured, cat=15

From my perspective, I think it would still work well to be able to do the original concept of specifying the category and tag via the shortcode in the editor, ie: [wp_show_posts id="93" settings="category__and=style&tag__in=homepage"] but I’m open to whatever ideas you might have that would accomplish that general intention.

Thanks!

The main difference is just the category and tags to pull from.

So I’d have a bunch of lists that are identical other than the category and tags. Then I’d have a bunch more that are almost the same as the first set but a different format (for example card instead of row) and would pull from other categories and tags.

No two lists would pull from the same category and tag.

So in the situation above we’d ideally have two Lists (one for each format) as opposed to 20 or more.

That approach could work, but I’d need to be able to set the class via the shortcode in the editor, and whenever I try to do that, I get a fatal error when I try to save, and then have to go remove that code from the database to fix it. This was my shortcode:

[wp_show_posts id="119" settings="wrapper_class=tag1-cat1"]

I kept playing with and found a clunky workaround, using a field that I’m not otherwise using:

[wp_show_posts id="119" settings="read_more_text=tag1-cat1"]

I’d have to then hide that Read More button with CSS, but its doable. I can then do this:

add_filter( 'wp_show_posts_shortcode_args', function( $args, $settings ) {
    if ( 'tag1-cat1' === $settings['read_more_text'] ) {
        $args['category__and'] = 8;
        $args['tag__in'] = 68;
    } elseif ( 'tag1-cat2' === $settings['read_more_text'] ) {
        $args['category__and'] = 8;
        $args['tag__in'] = 25;
    } elseif ( 'tag2-cat1' === $settings['read_more_text'] ) {
        $args['category__and'] = 10;
        $args['tag__in'] = 28;
    }
    // etc.

    return $args;
}, 10, 2 );

Again, very clunky, but at least this gets me to a place where I don’t need to create dozens of Lists. Any better way you know of to do this now that you can see what I’m trying to accomplish?

Is there anywhere I can see what parameters the settings does have?

Any other way you can think of to get this done? Or any estimate on when 1.2 might be coming?

Thanks

Thank you, this seems like a perfect solution, but no matter what I try, the settings never seem to have any effect.

I’ve tried setting both fields via the settings and neither in the Dashboard, as well as setting each via the settings and the other in the Dashboard. The one I set in the Dashboard is the only one to ever have any effect – its as if the settings in the shortcode aren’t even there. I’ve also tried using both the category/tag names, as well as their IDs in the settings. For example, I’ve tried:

[wp_show_posts id="93" settings="category__and=styletag__in=homepage"]
[wp_show_posts id="93" settings="category__and=8tag__in=68"]
[wp_show_posts id="93" settings="category__and=style"]
[wp_show_posts id="93" settings="8tag__in=68"]
etc.

I noticed in the other post the “category_in” only had one underscore, while according to the WP reference it should have two. So I fixed that – but either way, it does nothing.

Any idea what I’m doing wrong here?