Get latest 4 post on a custom post filtered by category

I’m trying to get the latest 4 posts filtered by category.
My post type are products.

I already tried wp_get_recent_posts, but it doesn’t have an attribute for category filter.

Then i tried with the WP_Query, but is not working too.

$args2 = array(
    'post_type' => 'product',
    'taxonomy' => 'product_cat',
    'category' => '30278'
);

$the_query = new WP_Query($args2);
while ( $the_query->have_posts() ) :
    $the_query->the_post();
    echo '<li>' . get_the_title() . '</li>';
endwhile;

It shows me always the same posts.

This is my recent post code:

$args = array('post_type' => 'product',
    'numberposts' => 4,
    'include' => get_cat_ID($atts['category']),
);
wp_get_recent_posts($args, $atts['category']);

I tried to add in my args include, exclude, category and category name. without results.
I really don’t know how to solve this.
Thank you in advance.

There should be no difference and either custom WP_Query or wp_get_recent_posts should work like a charm in this case. (To be honest, wp_get_recent_posts uses get_posts and this one is based onWP_Query`).

So the problem is not with methods you’re trying to use, but the way you use them…

wp_get_recent_posts

wp_get_recent_posts function takes two arguments:

• $args – list of arguments that describe the posts you want to get,
• $output – constant OBJECT, ARRAY_A which describes how the result will be formatted.

So let’s take a look at your call of that function:

$args = array('post_type' => 'product',
    'numberposts' => 4,
    'include' => get_cat_ID($atts['category']),
);
wp_get_recent_posts($args, $atts['category']);

You put $atts['category'] as second argument, so the $output argument is incorrect. And even worse – you put category ID as include argument, which should be a list of posts that should be included…

How to make it work?

$args = array(
    'post_type' => 'product',
    'numberposts' => 4,
    'tax_query' => array(
        array(
            'taxonomy' => 'product_cat',
            'field' => 'term_id',
            'terms' => 30278,
            'operator' => 'IN'
        )
) );
$recent_posts = wp_get_recent_posts( $args );

WP_Query

So why the WP_Query method doesn’t work?

Take a look at possible parameters of WP_Query: https://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query

There is no parameter called taxonomy, so this one will be ignored.

There is also no category param, so this one will be ignored too.

And how to make it work? Easy – just use the same $args as in wp_get_recent_posts call above.