WordPress $post Object Quick Reference

John Crenshaw in wordpress

May 15

This quick reference / cheatsheet is for the WordPress $post object. This object contains a bunch of info specific to each WordPress post. Scroll down for the complete table of object properties.

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How to use the $post object

The values in the chart below can be accessed for a given post within the loop using the following syntax:

$post->$key;

…where key is the property you want to access below. For example, you’ll notice at the top of this post is a post summary within a formatted div element. The summary is just a formatted version of the post excerpt, but if there’s no post excerpt I don’t want that div element showing up empty, so in that case, I hide it using the following code:

<?php
if($post->post_excerpt != '') :
    echo '<div id="summary">';
    echo '<strong>Summary:</strong><br />';
    the_excerpt();
    echo '</div>';
endif;
?>

$post Object properties

Property	Sample Value	Notes
ID	432	Post ID
post_author	1	Post author’s user number
post_date	2008-03-15 19:22:29
post_date_gmt	2008-03-16 02:22:29	GMT = Greenwich Mean Time
post_content		Actual post content, including markup
post_title		Post title
post_category	0	Number representing post category ID#
post_excerpt		Plain text without markup
post_status	publish, pending, draft, private, inherit	Current status of the post
comment_status	open	Possible values: open / closed
ping_status	open	open / closed
post_password		Will be empty if no password
post_name	statistics	Same as post slug
to_ping	http://www.1to-ping.com, http://www.2to-ping.com, http://www.3to-ping.com	List of urls to ping when post is published (for unpublished posts)
pinged	http://www.pinged1.com, http://www.pinged2.com, http://www.pinged3.com	List of urls that have been pinged (for published posts)
post_modified	2008-07-01 19:41:28	Date the post was last modified
post_modified_gmt	2008-07-02 02:41:28	GMT date post was last modified
post_content_filtered		Exists to store a cached version of post content (most likely with all the the_content filters already applied). If you’ve got a plugin that runs a very resource heavy filter on content, you might consider caching the results with post_content_filtered, and calling that from the front end instead.
post_parent		ID# of this post’s parent. In the case of attachments, will be the post it’s attached to. Defaults to 0 if no parent.
guid	http://www.blogurl/postslug	Global Unique Identifier. The “real” URL to the post, not the permalink version. For pages, this is the actual URL. In the case of files (attachments), this holds the URL to the file.
menu_order	0 1 2 etc…	Holds values for display order of pages. Only works with pages, not posts.
post_type	page post attachment revision	Self-explanatory for pages and posts. Any files uploaded are attachments and post revisions saved as revision
post_mime_type	text/html image/png image/jpg	Only used for files (attachments). Contains the MIME type of the uploaded file.
comment_count	4	Number of comments, pings, and trackbacks combined