How you ever wanted to display your most recent posts in WordPress? Displaying recent posts helps your users find your content easily allowing them to engage with them more.
You can add recent posts in your sidebar, after the end of your post content, inside your post content with a shortcode, in your footer widget areas, and basically anywhere else that you like.
In this article, we are going to use a power user approach where you add the most recent posts to your theme. This is the most powerful and flexible way to add it. You have various options to get the content you actually want to display using this method.
When it comes to displaying the most recent posts in your theme using the code approach, there are multiple ways to do this, but the easiest and one of the most widely used approach is to use the built-in WP_Query object.
What exactly is this WP_Query object
The WP_Query object is by far one of the most important classes in the WordPress codebase. Given the background that WordPress was originally built to be a CMS which holds posts, the WP_Query determines the query you need on any given page and pulls posts accordingly.
It also saves a lot of information about the requests it makes, which helps a great deal when optimizing pages (and troubleshooting them). The other role of WP_Query is to enable us to perform complex database queries in a safe, simple and modular manner.
Imagine having to always write a SQL query with complex conditionals to fetch articles. With WP_Query you don’t have to worry about database connections, SQL statements, where clauses, joins etc. All those details are abstracted away behind this powerful API.
Fetching and Displaying Posts in your theme
To display the most recent posts, simply add the code below where you want to display the recent posts. You can wrap it in a function or just display it as is. Once you have a better understanding of the posts you can make changes whichever way you desire.
<?php
// Define our WP Query Parameters
$query_options = array(
'category_name' => 'blog',
'posts_per_page' => 5,
);
$the_query = new WP_Query( $query_options );
while ($the_query -> have_posts()) : $the_query -> the_post();
?>
// Display the Post Title with Hyperlink
<?php the_title(); ?>
// Display the Post Excerpt
<?php the_excerpt(__('(more…)')); ?>
// Repeat the process and reset once it hits the limit
<?php
endwhile;
wp_reset_postdata();
?>
The code above simply displays the five most recent posts which belong to the category ‘blog’ with their title and excerpts. The code starts by defining the query parameters in an array, the array contains the category_name and the posts_per_page. We then perform the fetch using $the_query = new WP_Query( $query_options );. Once that is completed we iterate through the results and display them.
The WP_Query class has tons of parameters options that allow you to customize it any way that you like. For a more comprehensive list of options please refer to the codex.
We hope that this article helped you learn how to display recent posts in WordPress. Feel free to reach out to our support crew in the case of any issues, we offer 24/7 WordPress support at a ridiculously low price.
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