500 post limit in Loop

Is it possible PHP is running out of memory to process that query? Check the error log in the WP install folder.

500 posts is a lot for anyone to visually take in – you might consider dividing them into sub-categories, for example, by name of movie, and display only
A – E
F – H
I – L
etc at first, revealing the detail when the user clicks on one of the choices. It could be set up so when initially displayed the first sub category is open and displaying. As far as WP, that is much less work it needs to do formatting all those rows for display.

Thanks stvwlf, I hadn’t considered that. Since I only wanted to display the titles like an index I wasn’t counting on all the memory chewed up by the post bodies. I managed to solve the problem myself with additional help from searches so if anyone is interested:

SELECT DISTINCT p.ID, p.post_title, p.post_name, p.guid, p.post_date
FROM wp_posts AS p
	INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships AS tr ON (p.ID = tr.object_id)
	INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON (tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id AND taxonomy = 'category' AND tt.term_id IN ( 3 ))
	LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta AS pm ON(p.ID = pm.post_id)
WHERE pm.meta_key = 'vern-title-sort'
ORDER BY pm.meta_value

That is the code I ended up using which takes advantage of a special field added to sort the posts (so that movies that start with “The” are moved to the proper place). To do the same thing without the special field:

SELECT DISTINCT p.ID, p.post_title, p.post_name, p.guid, p.post_date
FROM wp_posts AS p
	INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships AS tr ON (p.ID = tr.object_id)
	INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON (tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id AND taxonomy = 'category' AND tt.term_id IN ( 3 ))
ORDER BY p.post_title

This is similar to the example in the Codex but for anyone else wanting to retrieve all posts headers for a certain category (or multiple categories when you change the “IN ( 3 )” to “IN (1, 2, 3)” or whichever numbers you like) there you have it. My final iterative code looks like this:

<?php
	$query = "
		SELECT DISTINCT p.ID, p.post_title, p.post_name, p.guid, p.post_date
		FROM wp_posts AS p
			INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships AS tr ON (p.ID = tr.object_id)
			INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON (tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id AND taxonomy = 'category' AND tt.term_id IN ( 3 ))
			LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta AS pm ON(p.ID = pm.post_id)
		WHERE pm.meta_key = 'vern-title-sort'
		ORDER BY pm.meta_value";
	if ( $posts = $wpdb->get_results($query) ) {
		foreach ($posts as $post) {
?>
	<li><a href="<?php echo get_permalink($post->id)?>"><?php echo $post->post_title ?></a></li>
<?php
		}
	}
?>

Hope this helps someone else!

Chris