I am currently working a magazine website that consists of multiple issues and various types of articles. I assigned a variable for the custom field issue number, and included it in my query in order to display only posts that are in the issue of the current page. Here's the query.
$args = array(
'post_type' => array('story','letter','interview'),
'meta_query' => array(
array(
'value' => "$issue_number",
),
),
);
$my_query = new WP_Query( $args );
This works for all issues except the first one. For some reason, my query will not recognize the numeric value "1", so I have to literally spell out "one" in the custom field for all articles that belong in the first issue.
Your meta_query is incomplete. You need to specify a key and since it's a numerical value you have to set the type. You'll also want to remove the quotes around the value.
'meta_query' => array(
array(
'key' => '_my_issue_number_key',
'value' => $issue_number,
'type' => 'NUMERIC',
),
),
Keep in mind that the issue may not be in your query but in the way you're saving the value. It would be very easy for the value '1' to be confused with 'true'. If you're still having trouble after making the changes above, open up your postmeta table and check the value being stored.