Is there a way to exclude posts based on meta_values?

I met the same problem before. I tried to use meta_query parameter in the query argument, but didn’t succeed. The code I tried to use looks like this:

$software = array(
    'post_type' => 'software',
    'meta_query' => array('key' => 'legacy', 'value' => 1, 'compare' => '!=')
);
query_posts($software);

But the problem is this query also excludes posts that don’t have that meta key.

So I had to use a custom query, that gets all posts with legacy meta key, and then excludes them:

global $wpdb;
$legacy = $wpdb->get_col("SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->postmeta WHERE meta_key='legacy'");

$software = array(
    'post_type' => 'software',
    'post__not_in' => $legacy
);
query_posts($software);

Hope this can help you.

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