If your website has very good articles, chances are you wanted to get extra mileage for those articles. And it is truly a shame and a waste if you cannot share them.
The question is, without manually listing and manually updating your list, how do you separately list those articles from the rest of your posts so that they stand out.
I found two plugins that you may find useful. The plugins have their own special features like time stamping, list sorting, etc. So your choice depends on which features you want to use in your site.
I did try them out and they worked fine, except that they require time for setting configurations.
But if what you wanted is only a straightforward list of posts for one or two categories which you want to place in your post template or in a sidebar, then you could just use the database query built into WordPress.
Here’s a sample code which I used to extract and line up the latest posts from any category:
<h2>List of Posts Under Category</h2>
<?php $recent = new WP_Query(“cat=ID&showposts=x”); while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();?>
<ul>
<li><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” <?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
Updates, 15 December 2010:
Listing and displaying posts automatically from a specific category or group of categories has never been easier. There are a number of plugins now available for this specific task at the WordPress.org Extend | Plugin directory.
There are also WordPress themes with this option built in. The two themes which I have used and found very powerful are:
Mimbo WP theme by Darren Hoyt. I understand that this is one of the themes which have “pioneered” this functionality. The theme’s single-post page can also automatically display posts on similar category. You can find this functionality in action in of our community blogs sites.
The theme designer, Darren Hoyt, is also known for his pioneering TimThumb PHP script which dynamically re-sizes photos which other themes have adopted. I have seen other theme designers using Darren’s TimThumb script, an open source project, in their designs.
Thesis by Chris Pearson – My introduction to Chris Pearson’s themes was by way of his Copyblogger theme. In fact, Copyblogger (with my own modification) is the first theme I used for this site.
This site is using Thesis which has built-in “killer entries” widgets used to select and display posts from specific categories like “Issues // Must Reads”, “My Two Cents Worth,” and “Tips…”
I tried both in a Page and Post. The Plugin’s are activated properly.
They simply displays
It is working now. With Copy/Paste, the “
<!-- postsbycategory -->” was put into the Html.det – Glad you were able to get that working.