Blogging Tips

Last week I gave an example of how to create a magazine style theme. This method allowed you to have a main post followed by a list of titles. This week I’ll explain how to separate these on the page so that you can have a far greater control over your layout.

The Latest Post

Rather than using the WordPress loop to display the latest post in full, we can use the get_posts() function to grab the latest post and display it in full. To do this we can use the following code:

[sourcecode language="php"]$myposts = get_posts(‘numberposts=1&orderby=post_date&orderby=DESC’);
foreach($myposts as $post) :
setup_postdata($post); ?>

Post tags that you usually use within the loop.

The Remaining Posts

Then we need to pull out the remaining posts in a list using the WordPress loop, however we don’t want the first post as we’ve already displayed this. To prevent the first post being displayed we use the query_posts() function, which allows us to add in additional parameters and manipulate the output in the loop. The code we use for this is as follows:

query_posts('showposts=5&offset=1');

This will tell the loop to retrieve 5 posts after the first post. We then use the loop to display the posts in a list with the above code just before the loop starts:

[sourcecode language="php"]

< ?php
query_posts('showposts=5&offset=1');
if (have_posts()) :
while(have_posts()) :
the_post();
?>