Get entry index

Question

Is there a way to find the current entry's index? So I want to know how many news items has been posted before the current one.

So when I'm looking at the first news item, it should show "no.1", and for news item 15 show "no.15" and so on.

What I have currently is getting all news items, ordered by date, loop through them until I find the one I'm on, and show the loop.index, which seems like it might be a bit slow, especially when we get to item number 100, 200 and so on.

Answer 1

There's no way to do that without a query to the DB.

Not sure if this is really faster, but try to only query for the IDs and see how this performs for you. Another thing you could do, is to add your conditional directly to the for loop tag:

{% set entryIds = craft.entries.section('news').order('postDate asc').ids() %}

{# Get the position of this entry's ID within our IDs array #}
{% set position = '' %}
{% for key, value in entryIds if value == entry.id %}
    {% set position = key + 1 %}
{% endfor %}

{# Get the amount of total entries #}
{% set total = entryIds|length %}

{{ entry.title }} (no. {{ position }} / {{ total }})

If you are not interested in the total number, here's another way to get the position. The syntax is simpler, though it does not perform better, as you still need to query for the entries:

{# Get this entry + all entries posted before it #}
{% set postDateParam = '<= ' ~ entry.postDate|date('c') %}
{% set entryIds = craft.entries.section('news').order('postDate asc').postDate(postDateParam).ids() %}

{# Count them #}
{% set position = entryIds|length %}

{{ entry.title }} (no. {{ position }})

Answer 2

You can use Twig's attribute function.

For array's it is 0-indexed, so if you want the first element, it's:

{% set entries = craft.entries.section('news').find() %}

{% if entries|length %}
    {{ attribute(entries, 0).title }}
{% endif %}

The second would be {{ attribute(entries, 1).title }}, etc.