Find by date

[joshuag]

hi all,

I have been creating a blog in PW, normal. I have done this a few times. However, this time I decided that I would like to organize my posts in parent categories to make it easier to see in the admin what posts are in what main category... so I made a page structure like so:

/blog/ (template=blog)

- /design/ (template=category) (33)

- /general/ (template=category) (33)

- /music/ (template=category) (34)

- /Example-post/ (template=blog-post)

Inside those "category" pages I imported my old blog posts and sorted them into each category.

So let's pretend that I have 100 posts and I have 33, 33, 34 posts in each category.

So when I created my template for blog, I wanted to get the most recent posts. I have a date/time field called "published_date" - all the blog-posts have a publish_date value (dates spanning a couple years) and I have autojoined the field to my template.

Anyhow, I did a selector like so:

$posts = $pages->get('/blog/')->find('template=blog-post,sort=-publish_date, limit=10');

But this doesn't return the most recent posts across all categories, it returns me the most recent posts in the first category... well, the first 10 blog-posts in "design" category and they are sorted by publish_date.

Is it possible to find by date first? So that I can find all the blog-post items, then sort them by date... also, I know that I could find them all, but I need to limit my results and paginate.

I am afraid that I made a big oversite when doing this way and just might have to put all my posts into one parent page and select categories with a page field instead.

Thanks in advance for any help...

[ryan]

Your example looks okay to me, and it should work. Try these to see if any fix the problem:

1. Try dragging your /blog/ to be a child of some other page, and then drag it back out to root. That should force a rebuild of the pages_parents index, used by the particular find() function you are calling. If there was a problem in the index, this would resolve it.

2. Try adding "include=all" to your selector, just in case the pages that aren't showing up are unpublished or hidden. Though for your production version, you probably don't want "include=all", but it's a good test for now.

3. Rather than $pages->get("/blog/")->find(...), try it without the get("/blog/'). That part is adding a little overhead, so if you aren't going to find pages using template blog-post outside of /blog/, then there's no reason to have that /blog/ filter there. So try changing it to this:

$pages->find("template=blog-post, sort=-publish_date, limit=10"); 

4. Are you certain that template blog-post has a field called publish_date and that it is a date field (not a text field)? And do all the pages in question have this field populated?

Let me know if none of these fix it, or if #3 fixes it. If #3 works while the alternative doesn't, then I'd want to do a little testing here to make sure it's not a bug in PW's Page::find() function.

[joshuag]

Awesome! Yeah, looks like my index was out of shape. Moving the blog and putting it back fixed it. I am really glad that this works. I was thinking that I had been mistaken about how processwire selects from the DB. This is fantastic news