Ok so except answering comments, I have been on a little bit of a hiatus, but now I am back. One thing that has been bugging me is that a few people are complaining of The Attached Image not working in WP 2.8. I can’t find any problems & I have asked a few people I know that are using the plugin on their clients websites, and they aren’t having any problems either, not even with the upgrade to 2.8.1. So until anyone can offer up a specific error or problem I can’t do anything, since it works fine for me.

Anyway. One of the most common questions I get is why The Attached Image won’t work with a custom query. Generally the query will look like this:

$my_query = new WP_Query('showposts=4&cat=2');
while($my_query->have_posts) : $my_query->the_post();
//post code
endwhile;

Well that shouldn’t work, I’ve seen it work in some rare instances, but it shouldn’t, for the The Attached Image I mean. The main reason is because to get the plugin to work correctly I have had to limit it to reading queries straight from $wp_query, this is because of lots of problems with the $post & $posts variables.

There is an extremely simple way to fix this anyway. From my experience it also saves memory, which is very precious on a server, and seems to run quicker. This is also the way I was tought to make custom queries. I am working on making the plugin work with the other type of query, for compatibilities sake, but for the minute I haven’t been able to.

Anyway here is how, in my opinion, you should write them:

$tmp = $wp_query; $wp_query = new WP_Query('showposts=4&cat=2');
while(have_posts) : the_post();
//post code
endwhile;
$wp_query = $tmp;

The reason I think you should? Well if you need, say 4, custom queries in your template you would have 4 full query variables with everything stored in them using the old way, wasting what could be, a lot of resources & memory. If you do it this way you only ever have 2 queries, the original (stored in $tmp) & the new one, no matter how many custom queries you make.

Again I will keep looking for a way to make the other custom queries work, but for the minute this is the best I can think of. Who knows, according to 2.9 develoment notes they might be integrating the ability to show thumbnails per post, so The Attached Image might become redundant. :(

Anyway I hope that sheds light on why custom queries sometimes don’t work with The Attached Image, and shows what I consider to be a more efficient way to create a custom query.