How to determine category name of returned Posts in WordPress

Question

What i'm trying to do is find out what category the Posts are when they are returned so i can put them in specific divs.

eg i have #div1 #div2 and #div3 and i have 3 posts returned each with a different category.

What i want to do is have 1 post each in a div . To do this i need to determine the category.

Here is how i fetch Posts by category but how do i fetch Posts of 3 categories and determine the category of the Posts returned, so i can change the div id?

<?php
//gallery
$args = array( 'category_name' => 'Clubs');
$postslist = get_posts( $args );

foreach ( $postslist as $post ) :
setup_postdata( $post );
?>

<div id="div1">
<?php the_content(); ?>   
</div>

<?php
endforeach; 
wp_reset_postdata();
?>

Obviously i could duplicate this code twice and just change the category and div names but is that the right way to do this?

Answer 1

To avoid copy-paste, I'd suggest putting your code in a function, which takes the parts you want to change as parameters. Something like this (I added the posts_per_page parameter, since you said you only want one post per div):

<?php
function show_gallery($category, $id) {

    $args = array( 'category_name' => $category, 'posts_per_page' => 1);
    $postslist = get_posts( $args );

    foreach ( $postslist as $post ) :
    setup_postdata( $post );
    ?>

    <div id="div<?php echo $id; ?>">
        <?php the_content(); ?>   
    </div>

    <?php
    endforeach; 
    wp_reset_postdata();
}

show_gallery('Clubs', 1);
show_gallery('Hearts', 2);
show_gallery('Diamonds', 3);
?>

I haven't tested, but hopefully it works and is enough to get you started.

I'd put the function declaration at the top of your template.