Based on your comments to me & Nikita Dudarev, what you need to do is create a variable to hold all the post information and then return it. Using the function you posted as an example:
function lorem_function() {
global $post;
$args = array( 'posts_per_page' => 10, 'order'=> 'ASC', 'orderby' => 'title' );
$postslist = get_posts( $args );
// create a variable to hold the post information
$html ="";
foreach ( $postslist as $post ) :
setup_postdata( $post );
$backgroundstyle = "";
// get the featured image and set it as the background
if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) { // make sure the post has a featured image
$imageurl = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_post_thumbnail_id($post->ID), 'medium' ); // you can change "medium" to "thumbnail or full depending on the size you need
// add the css for the background image. You can include background-size etc ad required
$backgroundstyle = "background-image: url('".$imageurl[0]."');";
}
// add the information to the variable
$html .= '<div style="'.$backgroundstyle.'">';
$html .= get_the_date();
$html .= "<br />";
$html .= get_the_title();
$html .= get_the_excerpt();
$html .= "</div>";
endforeach;
wp_reset_postdata();
return $html;
}
add_shortcode('lorem', 'lorem_function');
Note that the_date()
, the_title()
and the_excerpt()
all display the information (just like echo
).
Instead you must use get_the_date()
, get_the_title()
and get_the_excerpt()
- these get the same information, but instead of displaying it directly, they return it as a variable which you can then store in your html string to be returned.
Update:
As you don't want to use the variable name on each line for whatever reason, you can do it like this:
$html .= "<div>".get_the_date()."<br />".get_the_title().get_the_excerpt()."</div>";
I'm not sure why you specifically want to change it to do that - it makes absolutely no difference to how it works, it just makes it harder to read and identify any errors :-)