Showing posts live during a date range

Question

I've tried to follow a ton of other articles posted on Stackoverflow for showing posts between 2 dates. I just can't seem to get it working and I keep getting an error of: Call to a member function getTimestamp() on boolean

{% set startDate = now | date_modify('first day of ' ~ qFilter) %}
{% set endDate = startDate | date_modify('+ 1 month') %}
{% set entries = craft.entries.section('events').postDate('<= startDate').expiryDate('>= endDate') %}

(qFilter is a url param: eg "May")

I'm trying to show posts that were live during a certain month.

Answer 1

You are passing a string <= startDate to the field parameter, but you actually want it to be a string <= 2016-01-01, which you can get by concatenationg the <= string with the datetime variable. So change your parameters like so:

postDate('<= ' ~ startDate) instead of
postDate('<= startDate')