Wrong post title displaying from wordpress loop - wordpress-theming

Question

I'm building my own theme. I have a page set for my blog (with a template that I made) which I'd like to just display a few of my posts. It uses the following loop:
<?php
query_posts('post_type=post');
if (have_posts()) {
while (have_posts()) {
?>
<div class="blog_post">
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<div class="entry_date"><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?></div>
<?php
the_post();
the_content();
?>
</div>
<?php
}
}
?>
The titles of my posts are "First Post, Second Post, Third Post, and Fourth Post" respectively. When the posts are displayed on the blog page, they are displayed in the correct order, but the titles of the posts are incorrect. The first post's title reads: "Second Post". The second post's title is: "Third Post", and so on until the last (most recent) post which has the title: "Blog" (the page title). What happened to the titles that they got so screwed up?
What I've Tried:
I've researched this a lot before I came here. I tried using get_the_title() instead but that lead to no titles being displayed. I've also tried using the_title_attribute() to no avail. I also understand that I shouldn't be using query_posts for this loop but I'm unsure which is the correct method to use for getting the posts in this particular case. Most of the info I've read was unclear though and didn't seem to fix the issue.
Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Try something like this: untested
<?php
global $post;
$args = array();
$myposts = get_posts( $args );
foreach( $myposts as $post ) :
setup_postdata($post); ?>
YOUR HTML HERE
<?php endforeach;
wp_reset_postdata(); ?>

Answer 2

Okay Nevermind! I just found out what the problem was. I moved, "the_post()" to just after the while loop so now it reads like this:
<?php
query_posts('post_type=post');
if (have_posts()) {
while (have_posts()) {
the_post();
?>
<div class="blog_post">
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<div class="entry_date"><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?></div>
<?php
the_content();
?>
</div>
<?php
}
}
?>
I found this solution while I was reading about the_post() in the wordpress codex. Turns out this function is setting up information for the next post in the line, so it shouldn't be mixed in with the html output for the current post.
In regards to whether or not I should be using "query_posts()" is still something I'm unsure of and willing to take any advice. But the loop in it's current form is working.