Recently, I have been working on two sites that required that certain types of posts be listed on certain pages. This goes above and beyond the original usage of posts which was to be a list of brief news items listed on the page designated to be your blog in chronological order. So I had to find a way to make it easy for clients to add info and control when and where it appears on their site. Luckily I found the List Category Posts plugin by Fernandobt.
It’s what you call “elegance in its simplicity”. You assign a post to a particular category, then create a Post or Page and at a bit of short code like the example below.
[catlist id=8 content=yes orderby=date order=DSC numberposts=-1]
To break it down a little:
catlist id=8:this is the number that WordPress assigns to a category you create. How to find that? Go to your dashboard, and hover over Posts to make the Posts menu appear on the right.
Then, in the next window, you should see a list of your post categories. To find its id, simply hover over the name and you should see a url pop up at the bottom of your browser window:
content=yes: This parameter tells the plugin how much of your posts you would like to display on a page. Another choice would be excerpt=yes if you just want to show some of your text.
Tip: thumbnails=yes can also be placed in your shortcode if you would like to show a thumbnail image from your post on the page. Then, either the first image in your post or its Featured Image will be displayed in your post list.
orderby=date: Shows posts in the order of their publishing date. Want to have fun with that? Read this.
order=DSC: (Or, ASC) DSC is short for descending. So the posts arrange themselves by publishing date, with the most recent at the top. ASC will arrange them from oldest at the top to newest at the bottom.
numberposts=-1: This is a good one to know. Say you have a lot of posts from a particular category and they all have to show on the page? Setting the number to negative 1 (-1) will display them all. You could also set it to a number like 10 or 7 if you would like only the most recent posts to display for example.
There are lots of other parameters to use, but these few have served me well on at least 3 different projects so far.
Kudos to Fernanobt for not only creating such a useful tool, but also on a great job documenting how it can be used!











