meta value _recommended

That is interesting. Honestly speaking I have no clue as of now how to do this. It would probably involve adding an additional query to add 00 to the count before saving it in the database and then to also remove the 00 before displaying it.

Could you not use this:

meta_key='_recommended' ORDER BY $wpdb->postmeta.meta_value+0 DESC??

Hey, I did that and it works fine. $mylikes = sprintf("%04s", $recommended); and ltrim($recommended, '0') – thanks

Yes, I could just use the meta_value+0, but that does the same thing as meta_value_num. And I don’t know why, but the meta_value_num or meta_value+0 always creates some duplicate posts on my website and messes up the post order. The normal orderby=meta_value however works fine.

Glad to know you found a way. Would you mind sharing a complete code here?

Well I just changed the part with update_post_meta to write the value with leading zeros to the database.

$recommended++;
$myfblikes = sprintf("%04s", $recommended);
update_post_meta($post_id, '_recommended', $myfblikes);
setcookie('dot_irecommendthis_'. $post_id, time(), time()+3600*24*365,'/');

Then I changed the output to remove the leading zeros again. So that you don’t have “0001 People recommend this post”
$output = '<span class="dot-irecommendthis-count">'. ltrim($recommended, '0') .'</span> <span class="dot-irecommendthis-suffix">'. $suffix .'</span>';

To sort by the meta_value I simply use this:

<?php
  query_posts('&orderby=meta_value&meta_key=_recommended&paged='.$paged.'');

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

Hey do you know how I can have a URL opened at the same time when the vote is done? I tried by replacing the “#” in this line with the URL I want to open but it won’t work.

$dot_irt_html = '<a href="#" class="'. $class .'" id="dot-irecommendthis-'. $post_ID .'" title="'. $title .'">;'
return $output;

Thanks a tonne @nz123 for sharing that.

Regarding your question, you would have to to reply on JavaScript onClick to open a new URL.

@nz123 Hi again.

First want to apologize for not understanding your question. Only when I was writing code again I realized that you were using wp_query and not raw query like I had done.

I finally did use this


'orderby' => 'meta_value_num',
'meta_key' => '_recommended',


meta_value_num worked for me without any issue. Can you let me know what bug you were referring too.

Not urgent just want to learn more.

When I used orderby=meta_value_num, it happened that some posts were displayed more than one time. So for example I went through the pagination, and 1 post appeared at page 2 and then again at page 4. I don’t know any other people who had this happening – really strange. It might be my website that has 700+ posts. Anyway, with orderby=meta_value and the values with leading zeros it worked.

Hey I’m really trying to get this working: I want that when I click on the recommendation button in the loop, that at the same time it opens the selected post. I managed to have it open another URL with JavaScript onClick: `function open_win()
{
window.open(“https://url.com”)
}`
but this won’t work with window.open(<?php the_permalink(); ?>)

You have any idea how to do this?

No idea about that about the javascript part. But will keep it in mind.