Calling a Wordpress loop from inside a Wordpress loop

Recently I came across a sitution whereby I wanted to call a list of Wordpress posts from inside the body of another post, i.e., not coding it into a template, but embedding into the body of the post itself. Not a big drama, I thought to myself: I already have the exec-php plugin installed to enable the execution of PHP from within Wordpress posts, so all I needed to do was call the Wordpress loop from the point inside the post where I wanted my list of links to appear, e.g.:

<ul>
<php $my_query = new WP_Query('cat=XX');
  while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
	<li><a href="<php the_permalink(); ?>"><php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<php endwhile; ?>
</ul>

The code above follows a similar format to that as described in the Wordpress Codex for working with multiple loops.

This worked fine for outputting the title of the post and its permalink. The problem was that I then wanted to the replace the permalink to a link to an external site that was attached to the posts using a custom field.

<ul>
<php $my_query = new WP_Query('cat=XX');
  while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
	$link = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'site-url', true); ?>
	<li><a href="http://<php echo $link; ?>"><php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<php endwhile; ?>
</ul>

Unfortunately, this wouldn’t work; no link was output. But after some help from people on the Wordpress Support forum, I found that using get_posts instead of WP_Query did the trick:

<ul>
<php global $post;
	$my_query = get_posts('numberposts=100&cat=XX');
  // numberposts is required with get_posts so I just set it to a large number
	foreach($my_query as $post) :
		setup_postdata($post);
		$link = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'site-url', true); ?>
		<li><a href="<php echo $link; ?>"><php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

Problem solved!

(Please note that I’ve had to remove all the ?s from the examples above so that Wordpress shows the actual code and doesn’t try to output the HTML that those functions would normally call. So remember to put them back in if you’re copying this.  )