what I’ve never understood about wordpress

I have never understood this part of WordPress use, even though I have developed many templates for clients. I love WP.

There seems to be two different ways to access post data. One way that the default theme does it, and the way that I eventually end up doing it which feels like a hack but eventually gets me all the data I want.

For example, the default theme’s page.php main loop looks like this:

<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">

      <?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
      <div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
      <h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
         <div class="entry">
            <?php the_content('<p class="serif">Read the rest of this page &raquo;
'); ?>

            <?php wp_link_pages(array('before' => '<strong>Pages:</strong> ', 'after' => '
', 'next_or_number' => 'number')); ?>

         </div>
      </div>
      <?php endwhile; endif; ?>
   <?php edit_post_link('Edit this entry.', '', '
'); ?>
   </div>

Okay, great. But now what if I want to get the page’s slug name such as is stored in $post->page_name if I use get_posts and then a foreach, like so:

<ul>
 <?php
 global $post;
 $myposts = get_posts('numberposts=5&amp;offset=1&amp;category=1');
 foreach($myposts as $post) :
 ?>
    <li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
 <?php endforeach; ?>
 </ul>

Now $post has all that awesome useful data in it, but this means rewriting all templates all the time, which is a pain. Is there an easy way to get that data inside the first style of page listing?