Display Recently Updated Posts Wordpress

Question

Floating around the Internet is a piece of PHP code that is designed to display recently updated posts/pages in WordPress. After submitting a request to experts-exchange for assistance, within moments, I had the raw code I needed.

However, the original PHP code still didn't work for my WordPress installation. After some tweaks and a lot of additional bells and whistles, I had managed to piece together the code needed to only display recently updated posts.

At this point I ask for help to show only posts from a specific category. Is it possible to show only posts from a specific category? Can you help?

this is the current code:

<div class="statistics">
<?php
$today = current_time('mysql', 1);
$howMany = 10; //Number of posts you want to display
if ($recentposts = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT ID, post_title, post_modified FROM $wpdb->posts    WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_type = 'post' AND post_name NOT LIKE  '%revision%' AND post_name NOT LIKE '%autosave%' AND post_modified_gmt < '$today' ORDER BY post_modified_gmt DESC LIMIT $howMany")) :
?>
<h2><?php _e('ULTIME SERIE TV AGGIORNATE'); ?></h2>         
<ul>
<?php
foreach($recentposts as $post) {
if ($post->post_title == '') {
$post->post_title = sprintf(__('Post #%s'), $post->ID);
}
/* If no post title exists one will be assigned to it. */
echo "<li><a href='".get_permalink($post->ID)."'>";
echo mysql2date('d/m/Y', $post->post_modified); 
echo "&nbsp;-&nbsp;";
echo $post->post_title;
echo '</a></li>';
}
?>
</ul>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>

The table are the categories stored in wp_term_taxonomy and which method is used to store items under a specific category database and its ID ( term_taxonomy_id ) This is a picture:

TABLE picture

In a plugin ( recently-updated-posts ) I found this function but I do not know how to put it in my code...

if ($options['excludeCategory']) {
$select .= ", GROUP_CONCAT(`tt`.`term_id`) AS `terms`";
$from   .= " LEFT JOIN `{$wpdb->term_relationships}` AS `tr` ON `tr`.`object_id` = `p`.`ID`"
                     . " LEFT JOIN `{$wpdb->term_taxonomy}` AS `tt` ON `tt`.`term_taxonomy_id` =   `tr`.`term_taxonomy_id`";
 $where  .= " AND `tt`.`taxonomy` = 'category'"
 . " AND `tt`.`term_id` NOT IN ({$options['excludeCategory']})";
 $group  = "GROUP BY `ID`";
 }

Answer 1

I would use wp_get_recent_posts and pass in the arguments for category.

<ul>
<?php
$args = array( 'category' => '5' );
$recent_posts = wp_get_recent_posts( $args );
foreach( $recent_posts as $post ){
if ($post["post_title"] == '') {
$post["post_title"] = sprintf(__('Post #%s'), $post["ID"]);
}
?>
<li><a href='<?php echo get_permalink($post["ID"]) ?>'>
<?php echo mysql2date('d/m/Y', $post["post_modified"])?>
&nbsp;-&nbsp;
<?php echo $post["post_title"]?>
</a></li>
}
?>
</ul>

Answer 2

This code is another way of getting the recently updated posts and pages.

<?php 

$today  = current_time('mysql', 1);
$number = 5; // number of posts

if($recentposts = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT ID, post_title FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_modified_gmt < '$today' ORDER BY post_modified_gmt DESC LIMIT $number")):

?>

<h2><?php _e("Recently Updated"); ?></h2>
<ul>
<?php

foreach($recentposts as $post) {

    if($post->post_title == '') $post->post_title = sprintf(__('Post #%s'), $post->ID);
    echo '<li><a href="'.get_permalink($post->ID).'">'.the_title().'</a></li>';

} ?>
</ul>

<?php endif; ?>

Answer 3

Final code:

<div class="update">
<?php
$today = current_time('mysql', 1);
if ($recentposts = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT ID, post_title, post_modified FROM $wpdb->posts    WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_type = 'post' AND post_name NOT LIKE  '%revision%' AND post_name NOT LIKE '%autosave%' AND post_modified_gmt < '$today' ORDER BY post_modified_gmt")) :
?>
<h2><?php _e('GLI ULTIMI EPISODI AGGIUNTI'); ?></h2>        
<ul>
<?php $args = array('category' => '30', 'orderby'  => 'modified', 'post_status' => 'publish',   'posts_per_page' => 11);
$recent_posts = wp_get_recent_posts($args);
foreach ($recent_posts as $post) {
if ($post["post_title"] == ''){ $post["post_title"] = sprintf(__('Post #%s'), $post["ID"]);
}
?>
<li><?php echo mysql2date('d/m/Y', $post["post_modified"]) ?>
&nbsp;-&nbsp;
<a href='<?php echo get_permalink($post["ID"]) ?>'>
<?php echo $post["post_title"] ?>
</a></li> <?php } ?>
</ul>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>