How to put a random post on your Wordpress blog

Posted on January 4th, 2007.

How to put a random post or excerpt on your Wordpress blog? That was the question, which crossed my mind yesterday. Thanks to Google, that I've found the method on Wordpress forum. It is just simple. What you need to do is paste the code below on your theme files. In this blog, I put the random excerpt on the top right, so that it is easy to be noticed.

PLAIN TEXT

PHP:

<?php
$rand_id = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = 'publish' ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1");
query_posts("p=$rand_id");
?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
<br /><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">Read more...</a>
<?php endwhile; ?>

< ?php the_excerpt(); ?> can be changed to < ?php the_content(); ?> if you want to display the full post instead of the excerpt.

If you dont want to mess with this code, you have another choice to use Wordpress plugins from wasabi, Random Posts and Random Excerpts. According to the author, you can limit the length of the excerpt generated, which cannot be done by the code above.

But I don't use the plugins. Doing something without plugins is better for me because I can learn while applying the code. Not just knowing how to activate or deactivate something. But it is your choice by the way

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