Top 3 Ways of Showing Recent Posts in WordPress Code Theme or Sidebar

Displaying recent posts in your WordPress is a norm nowadays on every other WordPress or Blogger blog, Now you can use any of these codes / methods to get yourself a nice recent posts list for last 10 “X number of posts “ .

1. Recent Posts Using the wp_get_archives function

<?php wp_get_archives(‘title_li=&type=postbypost&limit=10′); ?>

 

This would list recent 10 posts , in their own <li> tags , you can use this after post-meta or the_content () in single.php to list recent posts after every Post , or use it in any of your Sidebars.

2. Recent Posts Using the WordPress query function to query the Posts database 

<?php query_posts(‘showposts=5′); ?>
<ul>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php endwhile;?>
</ul>

This piece of code can be used anywhere in your theme , as it is self sufficient and it will display recent 5 posts, change the value of “showposts=5” variable to whatever no. of posts you want

3. Recent Posts widget / Plugins for the novice and beginners

If you are a noob at wordpress and still want to get the recent posts functionality , then try the various plugins available to do the work for you. You  can use any of these ..

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=recent+posts

OR Use the Add plugin option in your WordPress Dashboard, and search for recent posts  and you can install the plugin from their directly and easily .

Out of the 3 mentioned above I would recommend using first 2 , as they give you more control but only if you know some PHP and programming , otherwise go for the plugins ( it’s the easy way out ! ).

Tags: PHP, query, query function, query posts, Recent posts, sidebars, Wordpress, Wordpress codex, Wordpress customization help, Wordpress Plugin

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 at 1:58 am and is filed under Wordpress, Wordpress Plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.