How to add looping advertisement and different pos

Question

So I have this loop which queries posts only from a specific category and displays them with the same style. What I want is to display a different styled post + 1 adsense ad every 5 posts while the others posts keep the same style. Ex: 1 big picture post + 1 ad + 3 small posts. I'm using infinite scroll plugin so it'd be cool to have it this way. I'm still way too newbie at .php and WP so I haven't tried much except for some custom html and css inside to loop, which obviously did not work.

 <?php query_posts("cat=8&paged=$paged&posts_per_page=7"); ?>
 <?php while ( have_posts() ): the_post(); ?>
 <article id="entry-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class('entry group'); ?>>
  <div id="postcontent"></div>
 </article>
 <?php endwhile; ?>
 <?php wp_reset_query(); ?>

Answer 1

Here's one idea:

Add your custom function or introduce your own hook inside the loop:

<?php while ( have_posts() ): the_post(); ?>

    <article id="entry-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class('entry group'); ?>>
         <div id="postcontent"></div>
    </article>

    <?php do_action( 'inject_ads', $wp_query->current_post ); ?> 

<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php wp_reset_query(); ?>

where you can inject your ads like this:

add_action( 'inject_ads', function( $i ){

    if( 4 === $i % 5 )
    {
         echo '... your ad code ...';
    }

});

Here's a table showing how this might work:

i i%5
0  0
1  1
2  2
3  3
4  4  <-- inject ad
5  0
6  1
7  2

In the case of an infinite scroller, you could try to replace

    <?php do_action( 'inject_ads', $wp_query->current_post ); ?> 

with

    <?php do_action( 'inject_ads', $k ); ?> 

where

$k = ( $paged > 1 ) ? $wp_query->post_count * ( $paged - 1 ) + $wp_query->current_post : $wp_query->current_post;

to preserve the injection period.

Hope this helps.

Ps: You're using query_posts, but it's more common to use the pre_get_posts hook to modify the main query.