I fixed a chronic problem for Wordpress users: How to show a Single recent post on the Wordpress front page, 1) without setting “Posts Per Page” to 1, and 2) with the ability to exclude some categories from being eligible to be displayed on the front page at all.

See this article for background about how the Posts Per Page admin setting is EVIL. Nutshell: Setting posts per page to 1 will get you a single post on the frontpage, but will ALSO get you only 1 search result and 1 post listed under each category view.

I’ve played with some fixes, fixes that do NOT involve implementing the Wordpress “home” feature.

I want my Wordpress political blog at Radmod.com to show only 1 article on the frontpage, the very latest. BUT, I do not want the featured article to be my latest “Wordpress”-related rambling, or my latest silliness categorized under “diversions”.

Try this code in your index file, directly below the first line of LOOP code

The Wordpress LOOP is the codeblock that starts as follows: [close up all spaces to use]
< ? php if ( have _ posts ( ) ) { while ( have _ posts ( ) ) { the _ post ( ); ? >

Right below the start of the Loop code, I inserted the following: [close up all spaces to use]
< ? php if ( is _ home ( ) ): ? > < ? php if ( in _ category (16) or in_ category (15) ): ? > < ? php continue; ? >< ? php endif; ? > < ? php endif; ? >

Here’s how my code works:

• If we are on the homepage … [Wordpress knows if the user wants the site-root (homepage) or wants a specific article. If we’re on a specific article page, don’t do anything, just display the article as normal] ….
• … Since we’re on the Homepage, now see if the First Post’s category is 16 or 15 …
• …….. If we’re on the homepage, AND the category is 15 or 16, then invoke the ‘continue’ command, which skips the rest of the Loopcode and returns to the top of the Loop and works on the next post … [by “continuing” we skip the display of that post]

And my code will test each of the latest posts, until one of the posts is NOT in category 15 or 16. The first post in some truly political category will be displayerd, having skipped all the Wordpress or Diversion category posts.

Once the Loop processes a post, I have a BREAK command at the bottom of the Loop, to prevent the Loop from getting a second post. [close up the extra spaces] —

I put “< ? php break ; ? >” at the bottom of the Loop just above the following:
? php } } else { // end if any posts