Getting recent blog posts from wordpress

Question

I have installed wordpress on my site located at www.example.com/blog. on www.example.com I'd like to retrieve the top 5 latest blog posts and display date, url and blog title. Is this possible?

This means I want to get the blog posts from outside the wordpress installation using php and do a loop.

Answer 1

Yes you can use the RSS feed of your blog. Its a standard wordpress feature. Use a javascript (or some server side) rss client to fetch the top 5 entries from RSS feed and show it on your homepage.One such script is http://p3k.org/rss/

Answer 2

<?php
    $loop = new WP_Query('showposts=5&orderby=ID&order=DESC');
    if($loop->have_posts()): while($loop->have_posts()): $loop->the_post();
?>
    <div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
        <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
        <span class="post-meta">
            <?php the_time('F jS, Y'); ?> by <?php the_author_posts_link(); ?>
        </span>
    </div>
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
    No recent posts yet!
<?php endif; ?>

See: WordPress Loop, query_posts(), WP_Query(). There are also plugins to get recent posts.