Display Your WordPress Recent Posts on a Static Page

By Tracy Ridge

This tutorial shows you how to display your recent posts on a static web page. So now you ask the question ‘Define Static?’ There are a variety of reasons why you may have static pages. You could, for example, have built a website from scratch and then decided to integrate a blog or news section into it and require to pull some information from the blog to your homepage. There has been several methods on the web including directly accessing the database. This is a simple but elegant solution in which I will show you 2 methods, one of which will be on a page with a .php extension and another will be on a page with a .htm extension. If you want to display your latest posts on a existing WordPress blog please check out the following post

Live Example

I have recently integrated a news blog into a static website for a charity project that I am involved in. The website was originally made up of PHP templates and then I added a news blog into it. It was easier integrating the WordPress around the current design than changing the whole web site into a WordPress blog. Anyhow the homepage is a static PHP page which fetches the data from a blog/news section which is in a sub-directory.
Checkout http://www.alfiemilne.org.uk/

Prerequisites

I am assuming that you have WordPress installed on a PHP Web Server or are using web hosting. You will need a code editor with FTP support like Aptana Studio and some basic knowledge of PHP, XHTML and a little CSS.

Let’s Get Started

First of all you need to open up your code editor and open the file in which you want to add your WP code snippet. At the top of the page you want to add the following:

<?php require('wp-blog-header.php');?>

This loads the WP environment and template. If you have WP installed in a subdirectory then prefix wp-blog-header.php like so:

<?php require('YourSubDirectory/wp-blog-header.php');?>

Without this we wouldn’t be able to display our latest posts so please do not skip this step!

Now in the area you want to display your recent posts insert the following

<?php	
$args = array( 'numberposts' => 6, 'post_status'=>"publish",'post_type'=>"post",'orderby'=>"post_date");
$postslist = get_posts( $args );
echo '<ul id="latest_posts">';
 foreach ($postslist as $post) :  setup_postdata($post); ?> 
	<li><strong><?php the_date(); ?></strong><br />
	<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php the_title();?>"> <?php the_title(); ?></a>
</li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
 </ul>

Line 2 holds an array of items like the amount of posts you want to display, post type, post status and order in which you want to display them. To view more options visit get_posts on the WP Codex

Line 3 We get our posts and assign the array to a variable called $postslist

Line 5-10 We then start our foreach loop which will grab all the posts. We then wrap each post up in a div. I have also included the date. It will only display the date once if several posts have been posted on the same day. You can remove the date if not needed. We then display the posts pretty permalink underneath.

Finally we tweak it with a little CSS

.events 
{
   margin: 10px 0;
}
.events p
{
    font-size: 0.9em;
    padding-top: 3px;
}

Adding to a non PHP web page

Now to add our blog posts to a .htm or .html page. I found this little snippet from Reach Customers online This requires a little hacking of our .htaccess file which should be in the root folder of your web server. It may be hidden by default as it has a (.) as a prefix. Either navigate to it using your code editor, enabling hidden files or download it using FTP software like Filezilla. Make sure you keep a backup to be on the safe side. You may also need to create one if you do not have one already.
In your .htaccess file add the following.

AddType application/x-httpd-php .htm

order allow,deny
deny from all

ErrorDocument 401 http://www.yoursite.com/error/401.html
ErrorDocument 403 http://www.yoursite.com/error/403.html
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yoursite.com/error/404.html

Line 1 Make sure you use the correct extension. I have used (.htm) in this case but you could change it to (.html) etc:

Lines 6,7,8 Change the directory to which your error pages resides. This re-directs to an error page when the page cannot be found.

Conclusion

I hope you have found this tutorial interesting, if you do have any problems then please contact me. I would also like to hear your success stories.

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