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WP_Query: show all posts except the current post

July 9, 2020

This came up when setting up this very blog. I don’t need anything fancy yet like filtering by category, but do want to show a list of other posts at the bottom of each post – except I don’t want to link to the current post, because that’s obviously redundant.

There is a simple way to use WP_Query() to set up a new query and do that:

<?php 
    $the_query = new WP_Query([ 
        'post_type' => 'post', 
        'post__not_in' => [get_the_id()]
    ]);
    while ( $the_query->have_posts() ): $the_query->the_post();
?>
	<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
	... anything else you want to display from your posts ...
<?php endwhile; ?>

The important part of this is happening inside new WP_Query() – the array firstly says show everything where post_type is a post (ie. not a page or anything else), and then post__not_in is passed an array that only includes the ID of the current post from get_the_id(). In other words, “all posts, where the ID does not match the ID of the current post”.

After that, we re-run the standard Wordpress loop, but notice that the calls to have_posts() and the_post() are now made on our new query object, $the_query. If you forget to use $the_query->the_post() and instead just put the_post(), the result will be an infinite loop! (Ask me how I know.)

You can also run multiple queries with any combination of filters you like – just use a different variable each time where the above code uses $the_query.