How to do a Custom Query for all posts NOT in an array of post ids

what is $exclude? I don’t see a definition for it in there.

$exclude is the arraay of post IDs that I don’t want included in the search results.

On the first page of the agenda category, I display the latest entries in all of the nine subcategories under agenda. The post IDs of those categories are put into the array called $exclude.

At the bottom of that first page on all subsequent pages there is a list of more events – agenda posts – ordered by the custom field so the soonest event is listed first.

I don’t want to repeat the special call out posts in the list. That is why I put their IDs in an array to be filtered from the results.

I hope that makes sense. Any ideas?

Well, I can’t see the code you have from the description, but if $exclude is in an array, then it won’t recognize that. An array is a list of key=> value pairs that there would be no post match to (I’ve never seen a single post ID looks like “Array ([0]=>2 [1]=>6)” and so on. Usually it’s just one digit).

But like I said, you’re not showing the code on how you come up with $exclude – but it sounds like if you print_r(‘exclude’); you ‘ll end up with a list of key=>value pairs 9as mentioned above) – and it won’t exclude them because there’s no match for it.

You’d have to explode and do a foreach to pull in comparisons to flag the ones you don’t want to include. I’m thinking, though, that a “foreach” might be a bit much for the database query so another method might be better.

For example eave you the $exclude line, then your query will pull in all the posts using your query. Then you could just use a piece of code in your Loop that would pass by the ID’s you don’t want:

if(have_post()) : while(have_posts(): the_post();
if(post->ID == '2') continue; // skips over any posts that have the id of "2"

Thanks for your help doodlebee. Based on your suggestion I came up with a solution that works although perhaps its not the prettiest.

I found that statement
AND $wpdb->posts.ID !=
works for single post ids, but it wasn’t working when i tried to feed it the $exclude array. The $exclude array was created by putting in this line of code
$exclude[i++]=$post->ID;
after the few feature entry displays at the top of the page.

So I just created a super long $querystr using a foreach loop as shown here:

$excludequerystr = '';
 foreach($exclude as $nodice) { $excludequerystr = $excludequerystr . " AND $wpdb->posts.ID != " . $nodice; } endforech;
 $querystr = "
	SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts
	LEFT JOIN $wpdb->postmeta ON($wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->postmeta.post_id)
	LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_relationships ON($wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->term_relationships.object_id)
	LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_taxonomy ON($wpdb->term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id)
	WHERE $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_id = 329
	AND $wpdb->term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'category'
	AND $wpdb->posts.post_status = 'publish'
	" . $excludequerystr . "
	AND $wpdb->postmeta.meta_key = 'agendadate'
	AND $wpdb->postmeta.meta_value >= $today
	ORDER BY $wpdb->postmeta.meta_value ASC
	LIMIT 10
    ";

 $show = $wpdb->get_results($querystr, OBJECT);

In case it was confusing you, here is an example of a page I created that has a few feature posts at the top and then the remaining posts listed below and on subsequent pages.

https://www.theargentimes.com/travel/

However on that page it was fine to display the results by most recent post id instead of sorting by a custom field.

At the moment, the page I am working on is not ready, but for those who might be reading this in the future here is the page: https://www.theargentimes.com/agenda/

hi, thanks for the info! I was able to use the code on this page: https://hotguam.com

Worked like a charm!

My only concern is that this code will be obsoleted in future upgrades.