The WP_Query class is an exceptionally powerful tool in WordPress. As you may know, every WordPress site contains a database that stores many posts (of many post types) that make up the bulk of that site’s content, and WP_Query is the best way to fetch or retrieve a given selection of those posts for processing. So your theme files use it on regular basis, and a lot of plugins on your WordPress site will it.

This WordPress plugin development tutorial captures the steps I went through on a real project, including the mistakes I made and how I debugged them.

In this video and text Quick Guide, we present a basic use of WP_Query inside a WordPress shortcode, to show the post titles of the five most recently published posts. We’ve designed this Quick Guide to be a simple intro to using WP_Query in general, as well as to using WP_Query to display post titles and other post data inside a shortcode specifically.

WordPress’s get_queried_object() function has the distinction of being, I think, the most useful core function in WordPress that I didn’t know about for the longest time.

In our recent article on setup_postdata(), a reader posted a good question: how to sort a fetched array of WP_Post objects alphabetically by their terms in a given taxonomy?

Recently, I was working on site speed for a client with one page that makes a large number of custom database queries through WordPress’s WP_Query API.

Something I can’t remember needing to do before is to paginate a custom WP_Query. (Maybe my memory’s failing me, since this is what you’d need to know how to do to put post content at the top of an archive page—one of the weirdest and most common “Why can’t WordPress do that?” things in my experience.)

Recently, a client project I’m working on required something I don’t think I’ve done before: write a WP_Query to fetch a dynamically generated list of post IDs.

Making a widget to show a random post uses two underlying concepts you need to get familiar with to be good at WordPress development: making use of WP_Query objects, and making widgets. If you’ve not checked them before, check out our Quick Guides which more thoroughly introduce both:

We’re doing a WordPress development training session tomorrow!