WordPress Custom Loop and Ultimatum

What is the Custom Loop?

When using WordPress as a blog; you create posts that get posted to your blog page. In Ultimatum you setup your page by using the WordPress Loop. This is the loop used in WordPress to process and show you posts.

So, in that case, what is the Custom Loop? WordPress provide a way of creating your own post types; a way of ordering them so only they show on pages; more specific, it allows you to basically have custom blog posts on individual pages.

In Ultimatum; when creating a layout; you can select the WordPress Loop and you can select the WordPress Custom Loop. In this blog post we are going to talk about the Custom Loop (which I use elsewhere in this site to show my posts for my courses - go check it out).

Create Your Custom Post Type

Before we get into this; what  you need to do is create a custom post type. You can do this by going to the Ultimatum > Custom Posts Type menu option. Here you select Create a Post Type and run through the prompted inputs to create. When created you will see another option in the WordPress menu on the left with the name given for you Custom Post Type - so in my page I have one Called Courses which you can see in this image below:

Now that we have the custom post type you can create posts under that option in the same way you create posts in the Posts option. We will come back to this a little later.

Create Your Layout

The next thing we have to do is create a new layout. This layout will include the WordPress Custom Loop widget. What I suggest is creating a layout which is either similar or identical to your blog page (you can use clone from that layout); that is if you have a standard blog page.

The WordPress Custom Loop, unlike the standard loop; has only 1 tab of options. This is because you only control the page with the multi-posts on it; the screen where you see a list of posts. Most of the options are pretty self explanatory such as Item Count; Show Posts As, etc. The only thing you really need to change is the Select Content Source - which you have to select the custom posts type you created. The other options you can change to fit your idea of the page.

Below we see an image from my custom post type; note where I have selected Courses:

Viewing Your Posts

So; here is the tricky big. What you have now is a page that will show the list of your custom posts. However, if you select one then nothing happens. Your posts do not open.. So, here is the trick - the trick that I found from experiment (as I could not find the answer anywhere).. When you create your custom posts; what you need to do is select a layout of your standard blog page (see image below); or a page layout that has the WordPress Standard Loop on it. Now, when you click on one of your custom posts it loads using the standard WordPress Loop and opens as you would want..

Here is an image taken from one of my custom posts :

And thats it. Simple as that, just 2 layouts; one with custom loop and other with WordPress standard loop.

Conclusion

I searched over and over myself trying to figure out how to use the custom loop. In the end I discovered by experimenting.. Now that I have found out the info I wanted to supply it so that other Ultimatum Theme users can figure out and use the WordPress Custom Loop.