Rewinding Posts in WordPress a.k.a. Multiple Loops

So, in my WordPress adventures, there are times I’ll stray from WordPress’ library of functions for special cases. One of which being when I need to get the ID of the page/post for a random reson, outside the scope of The Loop.

The Problem

Let’s say in header.php of my template, I’m pulling a post:

if ( have_posts() ) :
	the_post();
	$current_page_id = get_the_ID();
endif;

This works, but, it increments the cursor of the global $posts array by one. The issue it caused in one of my older projects was that the blog home page (where the array contains 5-10 posts) was never displaying the most recent post.

The Fix – rewind_posts()

Luckily, WordPress has a nifty little function call rewind_posts() that will… rewind posts.

if ( have_posts() ) :
	the_post();
	$current_page_id = get_the_ID();
	rewind_posts();
endif;

Using this will throw The Loop back to where it should be.

A better way?

An alternative method of grabbing the ID, san-WordPress functions/tags, would be to grab the ID from the global $posts array. This would save the trouble, but strays from using WP’s built-in library of functions:

global $posts;
$current_page_id = $posts[0]->ID;

This works well, and requires fewer lines of code, but I tend to try to stick with the WP functions, as they will aid in keeping your code/plugins/themes future compatible.

Rewinding Posts in WordPress a.k.a. Multiple Loops

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