Query or Exclude Posts by Custom Field Data

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Get Posts with a Custom Field

Get all posts where the custom field called ‘country’ is equal to ‘mexico’:

$args=array(
	'numberposts' => '-1',
	'meta_key' => 'country',
	'meta_value' => 'mexico',								
); $query = new WP_Query( $args );

Sort Posts with a Custom Field

An example of how you could use custom fields to create a custom numerical sort order for your posts, using custom fields. The example below would get up to 100 posts from the ‘blog’ category that have a value present in a custom field called ‘sort’, these are ordered by meta_value_number (so 0,1,2,3,4 etc), then by ASC (ascending) order.

To sort your posts simply add numbers as values in the ‘sort’ custom field. So for whichever post you want to show first you can enter ‘0’ as the value. If you have multiple posts with the same numerical value for the sort value (e.g. 3 posts with 0 for sort) then these posts will be ordered in ascending order, followed by sequential ordering – posts sorted by 1,2,3,4 etc.

$args=array(
	'category_name' => 'blog',
	'orderby' => 'meta_value_num',
	'meta_key' => 'sort',
	'order' => 'ASC',
	'posts_per_page' => 100,								
); $query = new WP_Query( $args );

Exclude Posts with a Custom Field

To show posts excluding a value in the ‘sort’ custom field you can use meta_query. ‘Key’ specifies the custom field and the ‘compare’ value of ‘NOT EXISTS’ tells WordPress to get all posts from the ‘blog’ category excluding those with a value in the ‘sort’ custom field:

$args=array(
	'category_name' => 'blog',
	'meta_query' => array(
		array(
			'key'     => 'Sort Order',
			'compare' => 'NOT EXISTS',
		),
	),								
); query_posts($args);