Getting excerpts of posts to display on a static Front page

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  docheri · Member · Jul 1, 2013 at 1:25 pm

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  Hello WordPress Gurus,

  I’m using Twenty-Eleven for thomasdocheri.com at WordPress.com and I’m stuck. I want my blog to be on my BLOG page and I want my welcome text to be on my Welcome page, otherwise known as my home page. In Settings->Reading I have Static Page enabled, Front set to Welcome, Posts set to BLOG. That’s cool, so posts go where I want them to go but I would like recent posts or excerpts of resent posts to appear on Welcome as well. This so visitors to Home see activity. If the page doesn’t change they won’t automatically visit my BLOG page. Is there a way to do this? Thanks in advance. And just so you know, if I set Settings->Reading to “Front page displays your latest posts,” the post overwrites the Welcome message. I want both or only the Welcome message, if I can’t have both. Is that possible with this theme?

  Thomas

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  docheri · Member · Jul 1, 2013 at 3:49 pm

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  Hey, I think I found it (a solution, perhaps not the best solution), by hacking. I added the Recent Posts widget to the Showcase Sidebar and my latest post appeared below my static text plus links to recent posts appeared in a left-side bar. I had to redefine the Welcome/landing page to use the Showcase template instead of the Sidebar template. Pretty cool, except I lost the custom menu I had in the sidebar. (I’ll hack that one back too.) I was almost ready to download MAMP onto my Pro to run a local sandbox version. ‘Not gonna do that’, as HW would say, if WordPress.com will do what I want it to do.

  However, comments and suggestion re making the landing page in WordPress.com a true CMS (my goal) are most welcome.

  Thomas

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  rachelmcr · Member · Jul 3, 2013 at 8:53 am

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  Hi Thomas,

  It looks like you found a nice solution that works with your theme. :) Here’s another built-in solution that you can use with a static front page:

  You can add the Display Posts shortcode to any static page, including your front page, to display a list of posts there. This shortcode has a lot of different arguments you can use to display what you want on that page. You can then use custom CSS to style the posts the way you want. We have more information about this shortcode here:

  Display Posts Shortcode

  Please let me know if I can provide any further help with this!

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  docheri · Member · Jul 3, 2013 at 5:41 pm

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  Hello Rachel,

  CSS is so cool and building WordPress to use inheritance is brilliant. Thanks for the link to Shortcode. I may still implement a MAMP stack because now I’m simply curious. I spent 5 years as a SW engineer at DoubleClick/Performics in Chicago working on ConnectCommerce and then 18 months at Google after the great GOOG acquired DC. ConnectCommerce was 100% open source using LAMP (the P was Perl, not PHP) + Mason + DB2 and then Oracle. If I weren’t so committed to my fiction writing I’d join wordpress.org as a contributor.

  I just reread that last paragraph and boy do I hope Google does not acquire WordPress.com. I know some (not all) of you guys would get very wealthy but GOOG would compel you to rewrite the code in Java (ugh!).

  One thing we could have done that you guys did was put an editor in the application and let clients build and edit their own SE keywords. I’m referring to Appearance->editor in the .org version. Use this for building child themes in a sandbox or even new primary themes. Instead, we had an army of technical account managers to manage SE campaigns, mostly keyword management.

  Thanks again.
  Thomas