Drupal. Get filtered nodes in template

Question

in Drupal 7, how can I get a list of nodes based on a certain filter , in a page template? for example, page--popular.tpl.php

for example, getting the latest 4 nodes with content type 'article' and taxonomy name 'news' ?

I know most people do this in 'views' but there are reasons that I can't do this.

Appreciate if anyone can help!

Answer 1

Page templates contain regions, in particular, already rendered content region. So, I suppose, that your question must be correctly formulated as follows: "How can I make a custom page containing list of nodes, without using Views". To do so, you need to implement hook_menu in your module:

/**
 * Implements hook_menu().
 */
function mymodule_menu() {
  $items = array();

  $items['popular'] = array(
    'title' => 'Popular articles',
    'page callback' => '_mymodule_page_callback_popular',
    'access arguments' => array('access content'),
    'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,
  );

  return $items;
}

/**
 * Page callback for /popular page.
 */
function _mymodule_page_callback_popular() {

  $news_tid = 1; // This may be also taken from the URL or page arguments.

  $query = new EntityFieldQuery();

  $query->entityCondition('entity_type', 'node')
    ->entityCondition('bundle', 'article')
    ->propertyCondition('status', NODE_PUBLISHED)
    ->fieldCondition('field_taxonomy', 'tid', $news_tid) // Use your field name
    ->propertyOrderBy('created', 'DESC')
    ->range(0, 4);

  $result = $query->execute();

  if (isset($result['node'])) {
    $node_nids = array_keys($result['node']);
    $nodes = entity_load('node', $node_nids);

    // Now do what you want with loaded nodes. For example, show list of nodes
    // using node_view_multiple().
  }
}

Take a look at hook_menu and How to use EntityFieldQuery.