Show number of posts in category, just the number and not the category name

I think you’ll have to write a custom MySQL query to achieve that. I’ve never heard of such a thing.

Hye, I’ve got the same problem, referred to one of the docs but it is apparently deprecated. Now what?

Thanks!

If there’s still someone interested in a way, I needed something similar and came up with a little “hack” abusing query_posts()…

<?php $myquery = $wp_query;
query_posts('cat=a&showposts=999');
$numberofposts_a = $wp_query->post_count;
// [...]
query_posts('cat=b&showposts=999');
$numberofposts_b = $wp_query->post_count;
// [...] as often as you like for each category a, b, c, d, etc.
$wp_query = $myquery; ?>

This way, the plain number of posts is being assigned to the ‘$numberofposts-x’ variables. Of course, you have to set the query variable ‘showposts’ in your query to a higher value than the number of existing posts in each category.

Hi & thanks for pointing in the right direction, however, the solution above messed up the number of posts being displayed in my single post view. I resorted to the function used in the post-count plugin and added a category ‘filter’:

<?php 

function mdv_post_count() {
global $wpdb;
echo $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_category = 'your-category-name' AND post_date_gmt < '" . gmdate("Y-m-d H:i:s",time()) . "'");
}
?>

Call the result in your template using <?php mdv_post_count(); ?>

(I didn’t use the plugin but pasted the function into a functions.php file in my theme folder. You could duplicate and rename the function for different categories)

Anyway, figured this might be helpful to someone. For a bit more completeness there’s also the msg-count plugin which you could modify the same way.