The other day I ran into a situation where I needed to insert the results of a custom WordPress Loop within the results of another Loop.

Over on the Underground Film Journal, I create special Tag indexes for filmmakers that include their biography, filmography and list of WordPress articles I’ve written about them. While the list of articles is generated by the general WordPress Loop, the biography and filmography are generated by a special Loop of a Custom Post Type I’ve called “Filmmakers.”

What I wanted to do though was include a 2nd special Loop of just WordPress posts of videos by each filmmaker that I’ve featured on the site. However, due to the layout of the page, I needed to squeeze this 2nd Loop BETWEEN the biography and the filmography.

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Recently, I was trying to create Multiple Loops on a WordPress search.php template and couldn’t find any good tutorials on how to do that. But after a lot of digging around, cobbling together bits of code I found and some experimentation, I finally figured out how to accomplish this task.

Then, I started writing a long tutorial for others to do the same thing, but it got way too unwieldy. So, instead I’m posting up the final code I came up with and will make some comments below on how to customize it for different purposes.

But, before I post this code, I want to emphasize that I’m not an expert at either straight up PHP or WordPress’s PHP functions. This code I came up with might be clunkier than others might like, but it works just fine on my other website, the Underground Film Journal, so I’m happy with it.

Here’s the code:

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For years, The Beat has been my favorite pop culture “news and reviews” website. The site has a strong comic book focus, but has long since gone on to cover what is described today as “geek culture.” Me, I’ve been a geek since the day I was born, so The Beat is website nirvana to me.

The Beat is — and always has been — run by Heidi MacDonald. She has been, to put it mildly, a tremendous inspiration to me, especially in the way I run my own media site, the Underground Film Journal. While Heidi’s writing style in general is wickedly entertaining, I most enjoy when she tackles thorny issues, such as trying to make a living as an independent artist or a web professional. Her thoughts are always inspirational and thought-provoking to me.

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WordPress has a pretty robust and customizable built-in image gallery system. However, when it comes to displaying each image properly on its own dedicated WordPress page, there doesn’t seem to be many comprehensive resources online to figuring out how to make that happen.

I’m hoping to shed a little bit of light on how to do just that with this article.

I was able to figure out a good image display system for my other website, the Underground Film Journal, after piecing together snippets of code from the WordPress codex and WordPress support forums.

For a WordPress image gallery, it’s a really good idea to publicly display each image on it’s own WordPress page. Why? The main reason is that this is a great way to churn out extra pageviews if visitors click on an image.

Plus, a fully developed WordPress image page display can show enough information that it can become as an invaluable resource to your site’s visitors as much as a regular article post is.

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