Oct
19
2009

Display Random Posts in WordPress

by   |  Posted in Tutorials  |  15 comments

I am working on a new WordPress site and I wanted to display a selection of random posts at the bottom of every page. It is pretty simple to do, but I also wanted to make sure that on single post pages, the current post would be excluded. That took a little bit more figuring out but I got it working.

Here is a quick piece of code to insert into your WordPress templates so that you can display a list of random posts, excluding the current post that is displayed.

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<?php 
global $post;
$postid = $post->ID;
$args = array(
'orderby' => 'rand',
'showposts'=>5,
'post__not_in'=>array($postid)
);
query_posts($args);
echo '<ul>';
while (have_posts()) : the_post();
echo '<li><a href="'.get_permalink().'" title="'.the_title('','',false).'">'.the_title('','',false).'</a></li>';
endwhile;
echo '</ul>';
?>

You can always change the number of random posts displayed by increasing or decreasing the ‘showposts’ variable. You can also make it category specific by adding a 'cat'=>24, to the $args array, where ’24′ is the category ID.

About the author:

A freelance web developer living in Montreal who spends most of his time writing for this site and building Premium themes for WordPress. You can find him on Twitter @bavotasan.

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Discussion 15 Comments

  1. Constantin on November 30, 2009 at 12:46 pm

    Please tell us how to make a conclusion of a random post in WordPress only in the sidebar, without changing the basic news feeds
    Thanks

  2. Queensland on March 17, 2010 at 7:36 am

    Hello!
    Excellent, kind of works…
    where actually do i add ‘cat’=>24,?
    thank you

    • c.bavota on April 9, 2010 at 11:01 am

      That goes into the $args array so it would look like this:

      $args = array(
'orderby' => 'rand',
'cat' => 24,
'showposts'=>5,
'post__not_in'=>array($postid)
);
  3. Venkatesh on April 9, 2010 at 8:00 am

    What is the byline code for this… can one help me pls…

    • c.bavota on April 9, 2010 at 11:02 am

      What are you referring to by “byline code”?

  4. pradeep on April 9, 2010 at 9:01 am

    hi there, this is great stuff. But is there a way by which we could add an excerpt to this? That would make it so much more AWESOME! ;-)

    • c.bavota on April 9, 2010 at 11:00 am

      You could always add get_the_excerpt() function at the end of the list item like this:

      echo '<li><a href="'.get_permalink().'" title="'.the_title('','',false).'">'.the_title('','',false).'</a><p>'.get_the_excerpt().'</p></li>';
  5. TheShadow on August 1, 2010 at 10:06 pm

    Hi,Thanks for the post but can you tell me how to add random post with thumbnail?

  6. Guy on September 20, 2010 at 5:01 pm

    This is how I used this (very useful!) code and added thumbnails to it:

    http://www.arciris.com/design-and-blogging/wordpress-random-posts-thumbnails/

    You can see it in action in the sidebar here:

    http://guyjames.com

  7. Joanna Kingsley on May 5, 2011 at 7:05 am

    How is this better or worse than using any of those ‘related posts’ plugins that now are available for WordPress blogs?

    • c.bavota on May 5, 2011 at 10:26 am

      Using a plugin is great. But I am a programmer so I like to share simple pieces of code that I use, in case other people out there might want to use it instead of adding another plugin to their blog.

  8. Richard Vantage on May 22, 2011 at 5:33 pm

    I’ve just cut & pasted the code to a text file for use in the future on the blogs I create … thanks for sharing it

  9. Andkon on May 24, 2011 at 11:05 pm

    Thanks for this codes, I made some changes and it works fine.. Thanks for sharing, I really appreciate your effort and idea!

  10. Andkon on June 1, 2011 at 10:44 am

    I really love the code really helpful But I’m searching for much advance code with thumbnails and I hope screenshots are available as well.