howto use wordpress sub pages to view posts?

Question

I'm new to WordPress. I have my site (CMS) divided to several pages in a tree hierarchy. I'm trying to view posts in a specific category within a subpage. But for some reason event the simple "the loop":

<?php
if (have_posts()) :
   while (have_posts()) :
      the_post();
      the_content();
   endwhile;
endif;
?>

Shows ONLY (!!) the page content and no posts at all ... How can i do that?

10x.

Answer 1

You need a call to query_posts() first, before your loop begins.

Example:

query_posts('showposts=5');

You can see the full documentation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts

I'm not entirely sure that you want your page content method call inside of the while loop, because it will be displayed over and over again. I suggest moving it to outside of the loop.

By the way, to get posts from a particular category, use:

<?php query_posts('category=category-name'); ?>

Where category-name is the name of the category itself. It might be the category's slug name instead, but I'd try that first.

Answer 2

You can use this inside the loop to generate a (or a list) permalink of your latest post in one category. Change mycategoryname to your own category, and showposts to -1 to show all, or another number to show that number of posts.

<?php $my_query = new WP_Query('category_name=mycategoryname&showposts=1'); ?><?php while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a><?php endwhile; ?>

The basic idea of WP_QUERY is at Wordpress

as is The Loop, with examples