#meta_query

On a recent client site that sales aircraft engines, our client wanted to keep all engines on the site, even if they had been sold. Note that the site is not e-commerce as of yet, we are only displaying inventory with a contact button at this time.

The other thing the client requested was that all items that have been sold be last in the inventory grid. He also wanted to only show 9 products per page and paginate it.

We first added a custom field to the ‘engine’ custom post type — a radio button (engine_sold) with two values: ‘Available’ and ‘Sold’. As engines are sold, the client staff can login to the site and change the status of the engine to Sold with a simple tick of the radio button and saving the post.

Where things got tricky was trying to get engines with the ‘Available’ status as well as the ‘Sold’ status in the same WP_Query, so we could have them in the same grid. And on top of that, we had to be sure the ones marked ‘Sold’ showed last, and that we kept our pagination.

By using WP’s meta_query, we were able to call two arrays in the same call.

Here’s how we did it:

$args = array( 'post_type' => 'engine', 'meta_query' => array( 'relation' => 'OR', array( 'key' => 'engine_sold', 'compare' => '=', 'value' => 'Available' ), array( 'key' => 'engine_sold', 'value' => 'Sold', 'compare' => '=' ) ), 'meta_key' => 'engine_sold', 'orderby' => 'meta_value', 'order' => 'ASC', 'posts_per_page' => '9', 'paged' => $paged ); $wp_query = new WP_Query( $args );