[Support request] Can blog homepage display only posts with certain tag/category?

[Helen]

Hi Tom
I am just thinking about moving from a static home page to a page displaying excerpts from several posts (so as to let users choose any of several ways in to my content).
Only thing is I want to control which particular posts are displayed on the home page (not just let WP choose latest dates).
I understand this can be done by use a tag/category and a ‘featured content’ setting that tells the home page to only use that tag/category.
Problem is this seems to require a theme with ‘featured content’ enabled.
Is this something we have in GP? If not is it something we can do some other way.

Sorry if I have missed something – long term GP user but first time trying to do this!

[Tom]

Hi Helen,

Perhaps WP Show Posts would be useful?: https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-show-posts/

That way you can choose exactly which posts display on the front page.

Let me know 🙂

[Helen]

Great!
yes it does exactly what I want EXCEPT sadly it seems to conflict with Advanced Excerpt which I use to display my excerpts with formatting, images, media etc. Also to finish last sentence before adding more tag, etc.
So I either have no excerpts which defeats the purpose of the page or I use your excerpts which (no offence) are dull, just showing text…

If you have any other thoughts I would love to hear them – either how to make your shortcode obey Advanced Excerpt, or perhaps another plugin that just lets you select posts to display on main blog page?

Thanks!

[Tom]

You could tell the plugin to show the full content, then use the more tag to set your own excerpt cut off. Doing it that way will preserve your HTML: https://docs.generatepress.com/article/using-the-more-tag/

There’s plugins out there like Display Posts you can try.

[Helen]

Thanks Tom – I need to use the auto excerpt rather than the more tag for other reasons.

Display posts looks similar to yours (though not as nice of course) but I will check it out. Just wondering if there is any way you could make GP have the ‘featured content’ field in the customiser? Then it would be all easy (I think) via JetPack. https://jetpack.com/support/featured-content/

Of course I have no idea whether this is a gigantic task or not! And maybe it wouldn’t work anyway.
Jetpack do give instructions on that page for how users can make the theme ‘featured content ready’ but looking at it I fear it is beyond my level.

[Tom]

I’m not a huge fan of Jetpack itself, not sure I would add compatibility code in the theme for it.

I might change WP Show Posts to use the_excerpt() function which would likely work with the plugin you mentioned, but right now GP has most of my attention.

[Helen]

OK – I didn’t know jetpack was on the nose! Sorry about that.
But it wasn’t just jetpack – everything I read about having a home page display only posts with a certain tag said you need featured content enabled – and then gave php and htaccess etc etc that I could not follow.

Anyway – looks like for now I leave my homepage as static.

Thanks as always Tom!

[Tom]

No problem! I’ll see if I can make that change to the WPSP beta version and will let you know so you can try out the beta 🙂

[Author]

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