WP_Query by “Standard” Post Format

When using WordPress post formats, you’ll quickly start looking for a way to query WordPress content by the “standard” post format. This Trac ticket seeks to work on solving this. The implementation there handles URL-based requests:

http://example.com/type/standard/

quite nicely. However the code in that patch doesn’t (yet) handle direct WP_Query calls.

I was hacking on this a bit on my own before finding the (much more elegant and complete) code that Nacin contributed. I came up with some working code that does work with WP_Query calls, which I posted in this Gist:

View the code on Gist.

Note that this doesn’t create the taxonomy term and do some of the other nice set-up that Nacin’s code does. It could use a bit of cleanup – improvements are very welcome. This isn’t going to be at the top of my list for a while, so I wanted to make sure I published the code so anyone else who is interested can take a stab at merging the two approaches.


For my own usage, I wanted to have the list of recent “standard” posts that you see in my sidebar. To create this, I enabled the code in the Gist above, then made a slight mod to the Recent Posts widget that is included in core. If you’ve wanted the same, please grab the code and enjoy.

Note for future visitors: this code is working as desired with WordPress 3.3.x, but will hopefully not be needed in some future version.

This post is part of the project: Post Formats Admin UI. View the project timeline for more context on this post.