What are the best practices for using post_id? Can I use this safely in my templates to call specific posts, or will these post_id’s ever change?
The reason I ask is that randomly today the post_id’s changed on my site, and I’m wondering what could have caused it. It didn’t mess up any of the permalinks (thankfully!) but I did have to go switch some custom queries which were calling content specifically by the post_id (specifically in some custom_post_types I’ve created)
So… should I use a different query to get a specific post? The query I’m using looks like this.
<?php query_posts('post_type=home_feature&p=36')?>
Just earlier today, post_id for this post was 139 and my query was:
<?php query_posts('post_type=home_feature&p=139')?>
Obviously, when the post_id changed, my query (and subsequently the custom home feature) broke. I’m just not sure what could have caused this change.. and if that means I shouldn’t be using the post_id in custom queries.. Thoughts?
Post ID’s do not change. The reason behind this is the ID column in MYSQL is the primary key for the table. It is auto incremented when a new row is added. It is improbable that a post ID would change programatically unless someone is doing something rogue in the database.
Why not just do
<?php query_posts( 'p=36' )?>There shouldn’t be a need to specify the post type as post ID’s are supposed to be unique.
Or perhaps you could target the post by Title and get the ID from that:
I would recommend you a different way to go, for sample, instead of the id, just go with the page’s name, or create a meta data (custom field) with a check mark and call it.
For sure you will be safe that it breaks in the future!