Awesome.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to this webinar of Mastering the Query Loop Block in WordPress.
I am very excited to be able to be teaching this to you.
This is my first webinar as a part of the training team.
I'm super excited to be here.
This is not my first rodeo, nor is it my first webinar, but it's my first one with the training
team.
A little bit about who I am and what I do.
My name is Mitch Cantor.
I'm the director of engineering and a digital strategist at Web Dev Studios, and I live
in Nashville, Tennessee, or just a bit south of Nashville, should I say.
I've been working with WordPress for almost 22 years at this point, over two decades, and
I've worked with everybody from bloggers to big business on how to utilize WordPress and
tell their story online.
I've been at Web Dev Studios for almost three years at this point as the director of engineering,
and my job is to wrangle our engineering teams, help to mentor the developers that we have
on staff, and help our clients to build scalable and sustainable digital strategies.
I love teaching people.
I've been doing this for a long time.
I've been speaking at conferences for a long time.
If you were fortunate enough to be at WordCamp US, you saw myself and Jen Miller, who is in
the audience today.
We were talking about the work that we did on the Jim Joseph Foundation.
I was very excited to be there.
When I'm not building websites, I'm hanging out with my family.
I stream on Twitch and YouTube.
That's more on the gaming side of things.
If you're into video games, we can talk about that later, but that's not why we're here today.
First of all, show of hands.
For those of you that don't know and have never used Zoom in this capacity, down in the bottom,
there's a little heart symbol, and you can do reactions just like this.
I want to see.
Let's get thumbs up from around the audience.
Has anybody ever used the query loop block before?
We've got several thumbs that are going up.
If you've never used it, let's do a thumbs down.
I want to see if anybody is new to query block or hasn't gotten a chance to really dig into it.
This is going to help me to figure out how y'all are as an audience as well.
Looks like everybody has at least either seen the query loop block or at least has had some sort of cursory usage to it.
That's good.
Really, this webinar is going to start out at a very top level,
and then we are going to do a little bit of a deeper dive into the query loop block
because my thing with education is I want everybody to have the same foundation.
So if there's something on here that seems a little bit more on the introductory side, hang tight.
There'll be something a little bit more meaty as we go along, I hope.
But the goal with this is to provide an introduction for what the query loop block is and how it works.
We're also going to go back in time a little bit to see what the query loop block has replaced
when it comes to traditional WordPress development.
A large part of what I see working with so many people in the WordPress space is a hesitancy to adopt Gutenberg.
And this is going to be a very Gutenberg-centric webinar because obviously it's a query loop block.
It's a block that is used in the block editor.
And I want to show some of the old school functions that this is going to help replace in your workflow
of either using WordPress or developing for it.
And at that point, we're going to get our hands dirty.
I encourage anybody that has the ability to do so to either log into your own website
or log into a local install if you're a developer, pull up a blank website and follow along.
I'm going to try and go a little slow.
We do only have 45 minutes to an hour, so I want to make sure that we cover everything.
But I encourage you, have me on on one screen and work on the other.
And the best way to teach or the best way to learn is through a practical example.
Once we get our hands dirty a little bit and get into the query loop block in the editor,
we're going to go beyond the basics a little bit and talk about some fun ways to use the query loop block
that might be a little bit more untraditional.
And then we're going to have time at the end for people to ask questions in the chat.
I will read those questions out to make sure that they're covered in the archive,
and we'll go over what the answers to those are to the best of my ability.
If I don't know the answer, I will get the answer and we can find out.
And it'll be something really cool to talk about on social media after the fact.
But I will do what I can to answer those questions in the meantime.
All right.
So what is a query loop block?
At its core, the easiest definition of the query loop block is that it's dynamic content.
And it's powered by the built-in WordPress query system.
And if you're not a developer, a lot of this may be going right over your head already.
So I want to really step into this because what it does, if you've been with WordPress for any key point longer than, you know, maybe a decade or even less.
Back when we had traditional widgets and sidebars inside of WordPress, there was a very rudimentary widget called the recent posts widget.
Eventually, people figured out that you could use that widget and do a lot of really cool things to display your content in WordPress.
And what this query loop block is, is it's the great-grandson or great-granddaughter of that.
It's taken the code and the reasoning why someone would want to display those posts, and it supercharges it to bring it into a more modern WordPress-centric view.
And what it really does as its core is it enables fully customizable content types to be shown on your WordPress site.
And again, for those of you that may not be developers, I can already see your eyes glazing over a little bit because there's code on the screen.
We're not going to hang here too long, but it's worth knowing where we came from to know where we're going.
If you are a developer, this is probably going to look very familiar to you, especially if you've been working with WordPress for a while.
So this is a standard WP query, and I'm going to walk you through basic parts of it.
There's the query at the top that defines that it's a WordPress query, a loop that says if there are posts, do something.
The posts, which if it has posts, you go in and do these things like show the title and the excerpt.
And then it says if there aren't any posts down at the bottom, display this little bit of text.
And what the query loop block is, it turns this into this.
And if you look on the left sidebar, you see that there is a query loop block there with a post template,
which is the actual post information that's being displayed on the page itself.
Some pagination, next post, previous post, or even numbers to click through for pages.
And finally, no results.
And we're going to go through all of those pieces in detail.
But what it basically does is turn one thing into the other.
The query is the post template.
The loop itself is the if statement.
The title, the excerpt, the pagination.
This is all things that are done inside of code in the back end under the Gutenberg layer.
But on the front end where we're going into the block editor and doing things,
this is what this is inevitably doing.
Now, even I could break this down further because you could take this development loop
and understand that if we're instigating a new WP query,
that there's this long chain of SQL calls and left joins and tables
and all of this sort of stuff going on in the background.
And the good news is that with the query loop block,
you don't have to know all of that if you really want to fine tune
how your posts are being displayed on your website.
And that is at its first and foremost, what the query loop block is doing.
Now, let's get our hands dirty.
So I have, for those of you who are not familiar with this,
this is a local install of WordPress.
I encourage anybody that dabbles with WordPress to have something installed locally
to be able to work on it.
It's very easy to do so, either with WordPress Studio or local or DevKinsta
or many of the other opportunities out there.
I have a local version of WordPress running.
All it has is just the content that I've added onto it.
And I want to start by taking a very basic look at what the query loop block does.
So I've created a very, very basic query loop block on 2025.
And if you look at this, it's very straightforward.
All we have, I've added some dummy content.
If you don't read Latin, no worries.
This is just dummy content to be able to fill the space.
And what this does, if I expand out on the list view over here,
you're going to see something that we showed you in the slides very earlier.
And it's that the query loop block is made up of several parts.
And we're going to go through each of these parts in detail.
The first of these is a parent block that is the query loop block itself.
And if I come over here to the right-hand side, you'll see that it allows you to display
post types based on the different parameters that you have.
And there's a couple of different queries that we can run with this query block.
The most basic of which is actually the blocks that are running on a typical WordPress template.
So if I come in here and actually edit the site, you can see these templates here.
If I go into the template manager inside of WordPress, and all of these are running some
sort of a query, especially these archive pages.
And if I click on this archive page, you'll see here that there is a default query loop that's
running on the archive page.
And what it does is it picks up on the context of whatever page that it's on.
And this is a fallback archive.
So if you're on your categories page inside of WordPress and use this, it's going to automatically
know that you're on the category page and pick up posts from that category.
If you're in a tag archive, it's going to pick up the posts from the tags.
If you're on a special custom taxonomy, don't worry, that's covered as well.
Anytime that you have an archive or a listing of all of these various posts, this is the way
to be able to instigate that.
And all of these templates have, again, some sort of an archive.
It's not part of the scope of this, but you can go in and add templates to define either
a specific category, a specific tag, author archives.
All of those are running on some sort of variation of the query block.
Now, I want to be a little extra, and I want to go back to our page here because I want to
run a specific query on the page that I'm on.
So if we go back over here, I'm going to zoom this in just a little bit for myself and just
because we're on a screen.
There are, I mentioned two types of queries.
The first one is the default query.
That's what we were talking about being on all of these archive pages where it knows that
it's going to inherit the template query when it's placed on a specific template.
But I don't want to do that.
I want to run something custom.
So I can choose the custom option over here in the block options and then be able to select
various criteria that helps me to define what that query loop is going to be able to do.
Now, the first thing you're going to want to figure out is what type of content do you
want to display?
You can do this with either posts or pages, or if you have a custom post type enabled,
you can pull that in and be able to use those posts in the archive as well.
We're going to pick posts because I want to display the most recent posts or whatever I
define in the sidebar.
So we'll start with posts.
And the next thing we want to pick is how we want them to be ordered.
And we've got several options here.
So we can either say, I want the newest post first, and I want all of the other posts to
come in reverse chronological order after that.
So newest, second newest, third newest, et cetera.
Maybe I want it backwards from that.
Maybe I want the oldest post to be first, and then I want the newer posts to be able to
come after that.
Or maybe I want them in alphabetical order or reverse alphabetical order.
Perhaps I'm using this as some sort of a glossary.
And I want people to be able to go A to Z and see the different things that I'm offering
in this particular post type.
Any one of these will work.
I can select this.
It will automatically update the order in the window so that you can see and preview it
and be able to see exactly how all of your content is being sorted.
This also allows you to tell WordPress whether or not you want to include, ignore, exclude,
or only show sticky posts.
And if you're not familiar with what a sticky post is, it's basically a post that is designated
as sticky in the back end.
And on normal archives, that places it at the top of the post archive.
If you're on Twitter or other social networks, this is considered a pinned post.
Basically, you can pin multiple of them.
You can see all of them.
You can include them.
You can exclude them.
However you want to do it.
If I only want to show my favorited sticky posts, I could do that as well.
Or I could say, you know, I don't want the sticky post.
I just want to be able to see the blog in the order that I choose it to be.
And that's the difference between include and ignore.
Include shows the sticky post at the top.
Ignore ignores the fact that it's sticky and will show it, but it might be further down.
It'll allow you to see it, but it just might not be sticky as you would want it to see elsewhere.
Finally, the number of items per page.
So you can add this up to however many you want.
If you set it to one, it's going to display one.
And then if you set it to like any number between that, it'll automatically show you that number.
I'm going to set it to three just because I want to be able to scroll up and down the page really easily to see what it is.
I'm actually going to zoom this out one more.
There we go.
Beyond that is a couple of other options.
And these are a little more on the advanced side of things and really useful if you want to run multiple query blocks on the same page, which we will talk about.
But there are some caveats to that.
Beyond showing how many of them there are, you can also say, I want to skip the first X number of these.
So this is called an offset.
So that way, if you say have 10 posts and you want to show just two through nine, you could offset the first post here.
And the reason you would want to do that is maybe you have a featured query loop at the top that has bigger pictures, bolder text, a little bit of a larger footprint.
You could then say, well, I don't want to show that same post again twice later on.
And you could offset that post here and be able to show the first post really big with a items per page of one and then nine more, two through nine and offset it by one in order to be able to skip that first post from being repeated twice.
Also in here is the max pages to show.
So if I only wanted to show two pages of data, I could do that.
And it would even if the query has more results, obviously, I want to keep this at zero if I want the pagination to be able to go through all the way.
But maybe I don't want to show people more than three pages worth of results for some reason.
Maybe I'm very confident that the information that someone wants to see will be in those particular posts.
And that's the way to be able to do that.
Especially if you've got a website that has a lot of data, this helps to keep people from being overwhelmed with your search results and helps to kind of hone them in on the information that you want them to see in the archive.
So if I go back up to the query block here, there's the post type, the order, the sticky, the display options.
We can also add filters as well.
So maybe I only want to show certain taxonomies.
Maybe I only want a certain category to show up here.
Or maybe I only want a certain tag to show up here.
I can filter those out and only show those particular categories or tags.
Maybe I only want a specific author.
Maybe I want specific keywords.
Or if your website is using like the Tumblr style post formats.
Any one of those is accessible here.
And it allows you to fine tune your query to be able to show just the data that you want to be able to show to it.
With this as well are a couple of additional advanced options.
Very typical options here if you are familiar with working with blocks.
But I want to walk through these just in case you aren't.
You can add CSS classes if you want to be able to style or target that query directly with either CSS or some other selector-based thing like JavaScript.
You can tell what element you want it to be.
Do you want it to be a main element, a section element, an aside element?
Really good if you're very particular about how your HTML or your code is organized.
And also a button on whether or not you want to reload the full page.
So when someone clicks on the next page or previous page link, what is happening?
Is the page reloading?
Or is it using Ajax and JavaScript to reload that page in order to be able to keep the user on the page and then have a better, cleaner user experience?
And you can turn that on or off depending on what you need.
As far as the block itself, the loop itself, the loop is just a parent block to several other pieces of the query.
I'm going to cover the pagination and the no results because the post template is the most important part.
And that's where we're going to be parking and spending a lot of our time.
The pagination, very straightforward.
There are two different types of pagination that you can have.
And these are all also child blocks.
If I wanted to, I could go in and do a search for page.
Actually, I think it's called next post.
Yeah, here we go.
So I can use either next post or previous post and add these in.
But these are just blocks that are included in the block editor.
But if I go back, there's a previous page, a previous numbers, and a next page pagination.
And previous and next page do exactly what you would think.
It allows you to go into the next page of search results or the next page of archive results in the query.
The page numbers are a little more specific.
They allow you to drill into, I'm on the first page.
Maybe I want to click on the third page.
And it allows you to go there directly.
The previous page and next page allows you to edit the typography and styles like you would many other blocks in the block editor.
You can choose what background color you want if you want to do that.
If you want to select the size of the text, you can do that as well.
And then there's also other advanced classes and advanced typography like what font you want to use.
Do you want it bold, italic, underlined?
What's the line height and the spacing, the letter case, decorations, all of that sort of stuff.
These are very standard typography options.
And they are included with all of these pagination or link blocks inside of WordPress.
With the page numbers, there is one more option that I want to cover.
And that's to specify the number of links.
So if I have a lot of different pages, it allows me to say I want one link or I want two links or three links.
And it allows me to go in and specify exactly how many extra pages I show.
Because what will normally happen otherwise is it will show the first page, the page that you're on, a number of pages beyond that, and then the ellipses, and then the last page that you wanted to show.
And again, the more pages you have, the more likely you are to tweak this option.
There's no right or wrong.
It really just depends on personal preference.
Down here is the no results area.
And this doesn't necessarily show all the time.
As you probably can guess by what this is called, it only shows if the query doesn't return any results back.
Really useful to basically be a, I'm sorry, you didn't find anything with this query.
We don't have anything in this category.
We don't have anything in this tag.
And there are a couple of things that you can do here if you choose.
It comes with a very basic paragraph of sorry, no results found.
What I love doing is putting a search box in here.
And that way, if someone doesn't find what they're looking for, you know, you can actually tell them, try a search below.
And that will allow them to, if they can't browse for the content they're looking for, that will allow them to search for the content.
And this will only show up, once again, if there are no query results inside of what you're looking for.
So it's kind of a second step if somebody's looking for content to be able to guide them along to the content that you want.
Maybe they decided to look in a category and there's nothing there.
But now they can search for that keyword instead and be able to pull those results out of a typical WordPress search.
Finally, back up to where we are here is the post template.
So if we go back to the slides that we were talking about, which, of course, I closed those slides because I'm smart.
Oh, here they are.
If we go back to here and look at this, and I will view this just a little bit larger so that we can see.
We've got this part here that's called the loop.
And that's what this post template is.
And basically what it says is that everything inside of this loop area is going to be repeated for every entry that we have in our archive.
And so with this, you see here in the example, and we're going to mirror that inside of what we're looking at in the blocks themselves.
Right now, all we have is a title and an excerpt.
But that means that every entry is going to have a title and an excerpt, and there's other things that we could add to that as well that would be contextually relevant.
And we'll talk about those in a moment.
But the post template works just like any other inner blocks inside of WordPress and Gutenberg.
And it basically means that it just serves as the carrier for what other information that you want.
So let's say that I've got the title and the excerpt here.
Let's say that I'm very happy with this, but I wanted to add something else.
I can go up here to the block inserter, and I can say I want to add a category.
And I can have the category that is either the category or the terms list or whatever.
I can say I want all of the categories here.
And what this does is it will go underneath and give me, for every content that we have here, it'll give me a list of the categories.
And I can do that again as well with the tags.
And I can actually preface this.
Like, I believe this one here has the prefix.
And I can say something like tags.
There's no tags with this one specifically.
But if I go in and add these to each post, then we've got a little bit here that says categories.
And I can put that there as well.
Categories.
And tags.
And so every block that's showing up here and every entry inside of this archive is going to have the title, the excerpt, the categories, and the tags.
And so when I view this in a new page, after I save it, of course, you can see now that all of the options that we've changed over the course of the webinar so far are being used.
So here is the alphabetical order, AD and AU from the query loop itself.
Here is the excerpt content, which I will go back and show the excerpt and some of the options there.
Here is the category that it's in.
And here is the tag that it's in.
If I scroll down, you see that there's only three of them that are being shown so far.
And then here is the query loop itself.
I can go to the next page to get to the next page of results.
And then you see the previous page link here, the next page link here.
And you can see that you can get to whatever number of pages that you need with these results.
Now, keep in mind, this is a very basic query loop.
There's some fun things that you can do with some of these as well.
And I actually am going to take us there right now because I do have an advanced query loop that I want to showcase.
And this is also, funny enough, a query loop.
It may not look like any other query loop that you've seen thus far, but it is fulfilling the same purpose.
And so if I go in and manage this, you're going to see that this query loop has exactly the same things that I had so far.
It has a post template, pagination, and the previous next results.
And then for the no results, I'm just going to say, sorry, no results found.
But what this is doing instead is it's using the advanced query loop to show just a featured image.
And again, anything that you can put into a blog article or anything that you can put into a page can be queried inside of this particular query.
With the featured image, too, I can actually say I want it to link to a post.
I can save it.
And then again, any of these, I can click on these pictures and be able to view a larger version of the post along with the rest of the content that's in there.
Oops.
With any of the other query loop things, and again, any blocks that you have available to you are available to use inside of the query loop.
And the nice thing about it is you typically think, oh, well, I need to have like featured image and an article title and tags and categories and all of that.
But realistically, any of these blocks will work.
Maybe you want to have an audio embed that's embedded from each of your particular posts.
You could use that.
If you want all of your posts to have a cover block and then utilize some of the different elements in there, you could do that.
You could have buttons on every block.
You could use the row and stack and grid and any of these other layout and design options.
And that's what I did here with this is the post template is actually in the post template itself.
You can select whether or not you want it to be a grid automatically or manually positioned.
For automatic, it says what width do you want the column?
And for manual, it says, well, how many columns do you want?
But if I wanted to, I could even break these further down and I can go back to the basic loop and showcase this.
But I can say, I want the post design to be done a specific way.
I want it to be two columns, featured image on the left, text and title on the right.
I could very easily do that.
In fact, I can show that right now.
So I come back to my query loop into the post template.
I say in this post template, I want a columns.
And then on the post template itself, I want to put the columns right here.
I want to add, we'll do 50-50.
I think 50-50 will work here.
I want one column to have the title, the excerpt, the columns and the category.
And then I want the other column to have a featured image.
And we're going to have that be thumbnail.
And this is the thing with doing something live.
You always have to make sure that the right settings are there.
There we go.
I think it's because I'm zoomed in a lot.
Let me zoom out a little bit.
Yeah, there we go.
It's because I was zoomed in.
But you can see here, like with this, I can actually take this basic query loop and turn
it into something much more advanced, just with a little bit of the design blocks that
are available inside of WordPress.
So now we can see it a little easier.
There's the column on the left with the featured image, which now I can actually make that thumbnail
a little bit crisper.
There we go.
On the right, the title, which I can then make a link.
The excerpt, I can say there's a read more link down here to be able to read more.
So read more.
The categories and the tags.
I'll hit save.
I'll view it.
And then this is a very basic, but very standard query loop that you can include on not just
a regular page like this, but on any page in your website that you choose to, any template.
Because again, you can say, I want this to be the default query loop, and you could use
this on your regular archive page.
You could use it on your tag and category pages.
So anything that you have a list of posts or a list of content that you wish to use, you
could use this style and be able to pull out whenever you want.
And I will tell you too, if you really want to supercharge it and make it a lot easier
on yourself, you can set this to default and you can come over here to your options in the
blocks and say, create pattern and create this as an archive pattern.
We don't want it to be synced because we want it to be kind of using the same thing wherever
we, we want to be able to change it once we put it in.
That immediately gives you the option to go into any of your templates.
Like the archive template and take the query loop block that we have here and add in the
archive pattern.
We'll remove this one.
We don't have two queries.
And then that will immediately start to pick up anytime someone goes to an archive page,
any of the, any of the design that we've just put into this.
And it really does allow you to, to sort of supercharge and stop repeating yourself when
it comes to editing your website, making sure that the templates display the data that it
needs to, and ultimately just helping to be able to, to make this a lot, a lot faster and
a lot smoother.
All right.
I have a few other slides to go over and then I want to make sure that we have plenty of time
for questions because as cool and as very powerful as the query loop block is, there are some caveats
that I want to make sure that everyone is aware of because as powerful as it is, anytime that you are
pulling something from the database, like extra queries, extra blog posts, pages, a list of them,
there are caveats.
So here are some takeaways that I want you to really be able to, to understand from this.
So number one, any template, we've already talked about that.
Any template can have a query loop in mind, either the inherent loop that we talked about,
where it pulls in a contextual query based on where you are, category, tag, et cetera,
or a custom one that you can put on any page, like the, think of it like the Instagram or Pinterest
style, where it's just showing the thumbnails.
Most queries that can be coded as a developer can be recreated with a query loop block.
And I have to say most there because while it is very powerful, it is not something that
you can go in and granularly select which posts that you want.
You have to select broad swaths.
I only want the posts out of this category by this author.
I can't recommend specific plugins as the, as the workshop host, but I can tell you that
personally, there are other plugins such as advanced query loop and several others that
you can find inside of the plugin repository that will augment and supercharge the query
loop to be able to allow you to do things like that.
The query loop by itself is very powerful, but if you do need more fine tune control, there
are plugins that you can use to do that.
Again, I can't recommend any specifically.
I can say I've used mine.
The one that I've used is advanced query loop block, AQL, and I've had great success with
it, but that was my anecdotal evidence for it.
So yeah, anything can be done.
It can be coded and recreated most of the time with what you need it to.
The query loop block itself, just as a reminder, is a container.
If it doesn't have anything in it, it's not going to be of any use to anyone.
So it really depends on what you fill it with titles, featured images, et cetera.
And that's the key with making sure that the query loop block is built in the way that it
needs to be built.
And the good news is, again, any block that you can use can be used inside of the query
loop block.
If we go back and look at this one, you know, it's columns, it's sections, it's read more
links and buttons and categories and tags and all of that kind of stuff.
So anything that's usable can be added, which means that anytime you have an entry in your
archive or in your query, it'll show those blocks really nicely.
And finally, one caveat that I want to be able to tell, just because you can use multiple
queries with tons of blog posts doesn't mean that you should use them.
Performance is always, always, always going to be at the core of any decision that you
make inside of your website, especially because you can go in and tell the query block to run
all of the blog posts.
You can edit the query block manually to say, I want it to be randomly sorted.
And anytime that you do either randomized sorting or a list of all of the blog posts,
it's going to cut performance because it has to go into the database and pull all of these
blog posts inside of the query.
The same goes for if you're running multiple queries on the same page because it's going
out there and it's saying, hey, go grab this, go grab that, go grab this thing.
Performance is going to be impacted if you have too many queries running on a page.
So I would say limit your queries to one, maybe two on a page if possible, unless that you have
performance gains in place like caching.
You can cache the queries.
Again, that's a little more on the developer centric side, but you can tell WordPress to
cache those queries so that they're only pulling them every couple of hours outside of the scope
of this, but it is something that you can do.
Um, and then basically beyond that, uh, being able to, uh, have it limited to one or two,
uh, means that, um, any, any page that you loaded on is going to be, it's going to run
smoother.
It's going to run snappier.
Um, you know, if you are running a site that has a lot of content, you're probably running
caching anyway.
And that's something that, um, you know, you'll, you'll have taken into consideration at that
point.
Um, okay, I am going to, I believe I can do it from here.
Uh, I'm, I'm going to open up to where, uh, users can raise their hand, uh, and I can
unmute you.
So let me pull up the participants grid over here.
Um, if you have questions, I believe that it will pop up here at the top.
If you've raised your hands, uh, I'm more than happy to, to answer any questions that you
do have, if you'd rather type them in the chat, uh, that is fine too.
Um, Joel, uh, is asking, have I found good implementations of filtering for the query
loop block?
I, yes.
So the good news is that it really depends on it's good news and bad news.
It depends on how you want to, to filter it.
Right.
Um, the built in query does allow you some filtering as we shown by category tag and all
of that kind of stuff.
Um, I believe, and again, I'm, I'm saying this from personal experience.
I believe that AQL will allow you to further filter.
I know that you can set up the query itself to be more, um, supercharged.
It's been a while since I've had to really do a good, like major filtering of a query inside
of, of AQL.
So I don't remember offhand.
Oh, front end filters.
I see what you're talking about.
Yeah, that is, that is completely, uh, different.
Um, I believe, I believe until somebody can tell me if I'm, am I'm wrong on that?
I was going to say, I think search and filter is one.
Uh, and I believe facet may also be an option for that.
I don't know if facet is Gutenberg compatible yet.
Um, if you need more things like that, you're probably coding them in by hand.
Um, filter everything is also a really good one as well.
As Alicia said, um, again, it's a lot of the, there, there are several options really available
if you want to hard code it.
But when you start to talk about like front end blocks, the options do get a little more,
more slim, but there's some really good options that have been mentioned in the chat so far.
Uh, search and filter, filter everything, very good options.
I believe facet might also be in there.
Um, I'll have to check on that for sure.
So can you query, can you query loop query on other tables that are not in custom posts?
Um, I will say no.
And only because specifically the, the query block is using an instance of the new query
class inside of, of WordPress.
Um, and so if you want to be able to break outside of that to query something else, um,
you've got a couple of options.
Number one, I believe that there is a SQL query specific block that you can implement
as long as you know what that query is.
Um, and number two, um, if you're looking for a custom block, I bet you could go to something
like Telex, which if you haven't tried it yet is incredibly awesome and was put out
by automatic not too long ago.
Um, and you can have it spin up a block that will roll that custom development and custom
query for you.
Um, the query block itself though is very locked in on specifically a new WP query class, instigating
that, adding the arguments and going from there, anything past that.
And you're going to either want to roll a custom block with something like Telex or develop
it yourself if you're a developer, um, or, um, you'll run a SQL query elsewhere and then
bring those results in.
So, uh, let me see if I can look through here.
Cadence has some filter options.
I don't remember.
It's only in their theme.
Uh, I know that they've rolled some of their stuff out to other plugins, um, bringing up
Cadence specifically.
Um, but yeah, uh, the other plugin for, um, the loop query basically.
So it's, uh, the, what I was talking about is Telex.
Uh, it's not a plugin specifically, but it's a builder for custom blocks that automatic has
released.
Uh, you can go to the Telex website.
It's AI powered.
Uh, you can say, I want to build this block.
It has all of the coding standards already built in.
Um, there's some really cool blocks that are coming out of it.
So if you're not a developer, it's a good way to be able to at least get started on a
custom block like that.
If you are a developer, um, a custom block is going to be the way to go on that, I think.
And that will help you to be able to go past the query loop block, uh, and query whatever
other custom tables or options or anything else like that, um, that you need.
Yeah.
Rico has just posted the, uh, the link to that in the chat.
And I thank you for doing that Rico.
I greatly appreciate that.
Telex.automatic.ai.
They demoed this at WordCamp US and it was pretty phenomenal.
So highly recommend.
Okay.
Uh, I am going to leave it open for just a few more moments for questions.
Does anybody have any other questions they'd like to answer?
Going once.
Going twice.
Awesome.
Well, thank everybody.
Thanks.
Oh, what's the favorite thing that I've done with it?
Jen's coming in with a last minute question.
Um, I really love seeing, uh, not just what I've done, but what other people have done
with non, uh, with non blog post content.
So if you want like a, a shameless example, uh, so I am a video gamer.
I stream on Twitch a couple of nights a week.
I'm not going to plug that.
That's not what this is for.
Um, but I run guides for builds in certain games.
This is a query loop block.
Uh, and it allows me to say as custom post types, the guides that I have, there's some
custom logic running in the background that will allow me to exclude certain pages from
this.
So it only shows the ones that I want.
Um, I've only got a couple here, but I have, uh, this is for fallout 76.
If you're a gaming fan.
Um, but it allows, uh, it allows for me to go in and say, here's this build, here's the
skills that you need to stuff and like that and so forth.
Um, realistically, like the query block itself is just a vehicle.
Um, and if you're wanting to see some really cool stuff from it, the content is the, the
fun, the fun stuff.
Like I like gaming, so I found a use for it in gaming.
Uh, if you are a painter, you could use it as a way to showcase the paintings that you've
done in certain tags and taxonomies and stuff like that.
Um, and really the content is what drives, drives the query.
Uh, when will the recording be available?
It will be available on wordpress.tv as soon as I get it back from zoom, uh, and can get
it cut down and, uh, made sure that all of the stuff is in there that we need it to
be.
So, uh, great question, but I will be, I'll be adding that very, very soon.
Um, thank you all again for coming by.
Uh, once again, my name is Mitch Cantor.
Uh, I am the develop director of engineering with, uh, web dev studios.
Uh, you can also find me online at mitchcantor.me.
Uh, if you are into the video gaming stuff, you can go to mitchcraft.me and that is my, my
gaming stuff.
I'm not going to plug that anymore again, but, um, I greatly appreciate everybody coming
in.
Uh, I'm hoping to be joining in with the training team and doing more webinars like
this at least once a month, hopefully longer, uh, hopefully more.
Um, but I hope everybody enjoyed it and got a lot of really good information out of it.
So everybody have a great rest of your day.
Thank you so much again for coming and I greatly appreciate it.
And I will talk to all of y'all later.
Take care and have a good one.
See you later.
Bye.