Query by Post Format in WordPress

If you’re an avid WordPress developer like myself, you may have had a play about with the new “post formats” in WordPress 3.1. Great! What an awesome idea – now, how do I show only “standard” posts? Anyone..?

Yeah, it seemed almost impossible, but not quite! To query your WordPress posts by the standard post format only, you need to use the tax_query parameter, in conjunction with the NOT IN operator.

<?php
        $args = array(
        'showposts' => 9,
        'tax_query' => array(
                        array( 'taxonomy' => 'post_format',
                                  'field' => 'slug',
                                  'terms' => array('post-format-video','post-format-quote'),
                                  'operator' => 'NOT IN'
                                  )
                        )
        );
        query_posts( $args );
        while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

                <?php the_title(); ?>

<?php endwhile; wp_reset_query(); ?>

As you can see, I am using query_posts to define what posts I would like to bring back. I have told it to filter by the taxonomy of post_format, and I have listed an array of the post_formats available on my WordPress site. I have then set the operator to NOT IN; this means it will bring back any posts that are not in the above formats – which in my case is the remaining standard posts!

I hope this helps someone out, as it was hard to find much information on it. They should really make it a bit simpler to bring back the standard post format.