Most bloggers out there should have known the purpose to list a random post. That is so that your old post can still showed up and indexed by Search Engine especially Google. There are a lot of wordpress plugin who can do this. But too much plugin will cause wordpress to slow down.

This tutorial will show you how to make a random post list on your sidebar. Just like before it also based on anime-zone.net’s random post when viewing their post. This will be useful for a theme developer so they can include a random post capability on their theme.

1. Open your sidebar.php file
2. Put these codes:

   <ul style="margin-left:5px; margin-right:5px">
   <?php $cat_posts = get_posts('numberposts=5&category=5&orderby=rand'); ?>
   	<?php foreach($cat_posts as $post) { 
   		setup_postdata($post);
   	?>
   		<li class="cat-posts-item-<?php the_ID(); ?>" style="height:55px">
   			<div>
   			<a style="font-weight:bold; color:#1a7000" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="nofollow"><?php echo custom_trim_title(30); ?></a><br />
   			<?php the_time('j F Y') ?><br />posted by <?php the_author(); ?>
   			</div>
   		</li>
   	<?php } ?> 
   </ul>

3. Save the file

Surely, the codes might need to be changed a bit but keep this line:

<?php $cat_posts = get_posts('numberposts=5&category=5&orderby=rand'); ?>

From that line, we know that it will retrieve random five post from category id 5 which is in this case is for Lyrics category. the key to the random post is this “orderby=rand” parameter.
And to show the list, we use :

<?php foreach($cat_posts as $post) { 
setup_postdata($post);
?>

instead of the normal loop so that it won’t affect the main loop if you were to show the random post on home, archive, or single page

4 Comments

1.   Andrian   |  Saturday, 08 August 2009 at 8:56 PM

   Please help me, i think at something else, i don’t know to write the php code. I want to ad a section in sidebar “My best posts” (5 or 7) random selected urls from a predefined list of 40-50 url’s manually added by me in a separate php file.
   There must be done two things.
   1. Line of code from the box <?php wp_get……..
   2. php file containing the url list added by me one per line and the little script of course!

   Can you help me?

   
2.   Key Ödemeleri   |  Sunday, 30 August 2009 at 8:58 AM

   Can you help me?

   
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4.   Hemalatha   |  Wednesday, 23 December 2009 at 7:03 PM

   place your code on my web site but after refresh page view error for Fatal error: Call to undefined function custom_trim_title() what we do.
   please help me