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Simple pagination system in your WordPress plugins

May be you are developing a plugin or a theme and it has something to do with handing some pagination of your custom tables data. Here’s how we can simply manage it, I am not going to build all the admin panel stuffs, but just showing you the process.

Step 1:

Lets get the page number from the url query string. If we don’t find anything, we’ll set the page number to 1.

$pagenum = isset( $_GET['pagenum'] ) ? absint( $_GET['pagenum'] ) : 1;

Step 2:

Now we need to set per page entry limit and the page offset. We will use the limit and offset to get data from our MySQL query. If you are confused about the offset, may be you’ve seen it on PHPMyAdmin like this: "SELECT * FROM `table_name` LIMIT 0, 10". Here, we are getting the first 10 entries from our database. If we want get the next 10 entries, our limit will be "LIMIT 10, 10". So the first digit for the limit is the offset. It tells us from where we’ll get our next entries.

$limit  = 10;
$offset = ( $pagenum - 1 ) * $limit;

So, by this two lines we are setting the limit and our offset dynamically.

Step 3:

Now we need to get the entries from our database table with the help of our limit and offset variable and need to show them as you like, may be in a table.

$entries = $wpdb->get_results( "SELECT * FROM {$wpdb->prefix}table_name LIMIT $offset, $limit"; );

So, now if you change the url “pagenum” paramater from your browser, you can see that we are getting the entries by our page number. So it’s like we have completed our pagination system 😀

Step 4:

As we have completed the pagination system working, we just need to show the pagination links now and we’ll be done. WordPress gives us a nice function "paginate_links" to generate a cool pagination navigation link.
At first, we need to get the count of total number of entries in our table and calculate how many pages will need to show the whole entries.

$total        = $wpdb->get_var( "SELECT COUNT(`id`) FROM {$wpdb->prefix}table_name" );
$num_of_pages = ceil( $total / $limit );

Now, we can use that nifty function paginate_links to generate our pagination links.

$page_links = paginate_links( array(
    'base'      => add_query_arg( 'pagenum', '%#%' ),
    'format'    => '',
    'prev_text' => __( '«', 'aag' ),
    'next_text' => __( '»', 'aag' ),
    'total'     => $num_of_pages,
    'current'   => $pagenum
) );

if ( $page_links ) {
    echo '
' . $page_links . '
';
}

So, we are passing our current page number and total number of pages to that function and we are getting a nice and cool pagination system.

Here’s a sample code for generating a table with data from your posts table.

get_results( "SELECT * FROM {$wpdb->prefix}posts LIMIT $offset, $limit" );

echo '
';

?>


    
        

            

            
                post_title; ?>
                post_date; ?>
            


            

        
        

            No posts yet
        

        
    



get_var( "SELECT COUNT(`id`) FROM {$wpdb->prefix}posts" );
$num_of_pages = ceil( $total / $limit );
$page_links   = paginate_links( array(
    'base'      => add_query_arg( 'pagenum', '%#%' ),
    'format'    => '',
    'prev_text' => __( '«', 'aag' ),
    'next_text' => __( '»', 'aag' ),
    'total'     => $num_of_pages,
    'current'   => $pagenum
) );

if ( $page_links ) {
    echo '
' . $page_links . '
';
}

echo '
';

Output:

Pagination in WordPress plugins

33 thoughts on “Simple pagination system in your WordPress plugins”

  1. Hello, Tareq, I like your post. Great things are here for the people who loves to learn. I used pagination this way in my kolorob project at first. I had to learn it myself, but now I have changed the structure now, because I changed the uri structure of Kolorob from domain?page=1 to domain/page/2 to make it more SEO friendly. Thanks for your post.

    Reply

  14. For my latest plugin, I needed the pagination option and found the solution here. Just want to know from you that, is it OK to use @ceil instead of only ceil? I was getting an error of ‘division by 0’ when found_posts is 0. Thanks for the very helpful tutorial.

    Reply

  15. This tutorial is great, I have successfully added pagination into my plugin but the only problem I am facing is when I save options for the fields on one page all the options for the fields on all other pages are reset automatically. How can I fix this problem?

    I can post the code if you want. My plugin’s page looks like this: http://usmanali.net/plugin-page.png

    Your help will really be appreciated.

    Thank you!

    Reply
  19. Pingback: wordpress Pagination | My Blog
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  24. Hi, a newb question here but where exactly do you put the code to make this pagination work?

    Reply

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