This presentation describes what the WordPress loop is and why LoopBuddy is a great solution for tackling the complexity of the WordPress loop.

1. What is the WordPress Loop?
By Ronald Huereca
September 15th, 2011

2. Most of you have seen this screen:

3. Most of you have not seen this one:

4. When you a post...
Your post gets saved in a “posts” database table
Your post can have:
Post Meta (custom fields)
Taxonomies (Categories, Tags, Post Format)
Attachments (Featured images, galleries)
And lots more!

5. WordPress and your theme
automatically turns this...

6. ...into a post your users
can see on a web site.

7. How do you go from this...

8. ...to this?

9. With a Query

10. Queries decide...
Which items to display
Under which category
And sorted in a particular order
And any other conditions you can think of

11. An example query...
grab the post by
grab the post by ID 2338
post_status draft
grab posts by sort by date published
the post’s author

12. Once you have the results of the Query,
you can display them.

13. Here is a query result displayed:

14. The results from a query are outputted
in the form of a Loop.

15. This post is one iteration
of a WordPress Loop.

16. Let’s look what makes up
a Loop Item in WordPress...

17. The Loop Dissected
Date Published Post Author
Post Title
Post Content

18. So how do you create your own
Loop (cough, the hard way)?
Create your own Query -
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/get_posts
Create a page template in your theme -
http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages#Page_Templates
Assign that page template to a page in WordPress
Anything more complicated, you may want to create
your own child theme

19. Or you can use LoopBuddy
and Builder (the easy way)
Create unlimited queries and Loop layouts
Override any section
The front page
The archive pages
An individual post or page
Search results
Create a new section
A “blog” archive
A custom 404 page
A sitemap

20. no coding or theme
modifications required!

21. With LoopBuddy,
you control the Loop

22. Try out LoopBuddy and
be blown away at the possibilities
Try it at: http://trials.ithemes.com/config/loopbuddy
Buy it at: http://pluginbuddy.com/purchase/loopbuddy