Using Offset in Custom Post Type Query

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Reason of this behavior is pretty simple. First of all you have to know that get_posts uses WP_Query to get posts.

So let’s look at WP_Query implementation. On line 1998 of query.php you can find:

if ( $q['posts_per_page'] == -1 ) {
    $q['nopaging'] = true;

Then on line 2544 of query.php you find:

if ( empty($q['nopaging']) && !$this->is_singular ) {
    $page = absint($q['paged']);
    if ( !$page )
        $page = 1;

    if ( empty($q['offset']) ) {
        $pgstrt = ($page - 1) * $q['posts_per_page'] . ', ';
    } else { // we're ignoring $page and using 'offset'
        $q['offset'] = absint($q['offset']);
        $pgstrt = $q['offset'] . ', ';
    }
    $limits="LIMIT " . $pgstrt . $q['posts_per_page'];
}

It’s the only part where LIMIT for posts is added. And, as you can see, it is added only if nopaging is not set. So if posts_per_page is set to -1, then paging part of SQL query is not added.

So what can you do to work it around? You can set numberofposts to some big positive number.

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