How To Show Recent Posts On WordPress

This code helps you show recent posts anywhere in a WordPress theme, for example on the homepage or in a sidebar. It fetches posts with get_posts() and loops over them, leaving a spot for your own HTML. It shows 4 posts; to show all posts, use 'posts_per_page' => -1. As written it sorts by menu order, so change the order as shown at the end to list the newest posts first.

Put it in a theme template file, such as front-page.php, sidebar.php or a page template, ideally in a child theme.

<?php
    global $post;
    $args = array(
        'post_type'           => 'post',
        'posts_per_page'      => 4,
        'orderby'             => 'menu_order',
        'order'               => 'ASC',
    );
    $myposts = get_posts($args);
    foreach($myposts as $post):
    setup_postdata($post); 
?>

<!-- HERE YOU ADD YOUR POST BLOCK -->

<?php endforeach; wp_reset_query(); ?>

How it works

• $args sets up the query: post_type is post, and posts_per_page limits the number of results.
• global $post and setup_postdata( $post ) let template tags such as the_title(), the_permalink(), the_excerpt() and the_post_thumbnail() work for each post. Use them where the HERE YOU ADD YOUR POST BLOCK comment is.
• wp_reset_query() restores the global $post afterwards, so the rest of the page shows the right data. wp_reset_postdata() is the function meant for this case; wp_reset_query() calls it internally, so both work.

The same code on GitHub Gist

The snippet is also available as a Gist:

<?php
    global $post;
    $args = array(
        'post_type'           => 'post',
        'posts_per_page'      => 4,
        'orderby'             => 'menu_order',
        'order'               => 'ASC',
    );
    $myposts = get_posts($args);
    foreach($myposts as $post):
    setup_postdata($post); 
?>
 
<!-- HERE YOU ADD YOUR POST BLOCK -->
 
<?php endforeach; wp_reset_query(); ?>

Show the newest posts first

Both versions order by menu_order. Regular posts all have a menu order of 0, so this doesn’t sort them by date. For the latest posts first, change the arguments to 'orderby' => 'date' and 'order' => 'DESC'.

On a single post page you may also want to leave out the post being read: excluding the current post with post__not_in adds one argument for that.

Related articles

• a latest posts query with WP_Query: sorted by date, with a fallback featured image
• reading post data without setup_postdata(): the same get_posts() loop without changing the global post