Settings for “Page with Posts” Template

One of the most powerful features of the Page with Posts template is that it allows you to create filters on a per page basis that lets you display specific posts on a page. You can have as many different pages using the Page with Posts template as you need, all showing a different set of posts. You can make your Home page use Page with Posts as a much more flexible replacement for the default WordPress blog page as well.

The standard items you can use in your filter include: Category, Tags, Single Page, Order by, Sort Order, Author, Custom Post Type, and number of posts to display. The Order by, Sort Order, and Posts per Page are explained on the Weaver Options for This Page form. The Category, Tags, and Single Page options are based on slugs. As a rule, if you include values in more than one box, they will be combined, and the posts displayed will meet all the criteria you specified.

For example, say you have defined the categories ‘Cat A’, ‘Cat B’, and ‘News’ (among others, perhaps). These categories will have the slugs ‘cat-a’, ‘cat-b’, and ‘news’. You can see the slug names if you open the Posts->Categories admin page. The same is true for tags. So, to display a list of posts from a specific set of categories and/or tags, you simply enter a list of one or more slugs you want included, separated by commas.

The Categories list has an extra feature. If you add a ‘-‘ (minus sign) to the front of a category slug (e.g., -uncategorized), then all the posts from that category will be excluded. So if you placed -uncategorized in the Category box, then only posts that have a category other than Uncategorized will be displayed.

Note: Because of what might be described as a quirk in how WordPress handles category filtering, if you specify specific categories to show (as opposed to not show), then sticky posts won’t be displayed at the front with special formatting. They are displayed in their normal sort order. You can also see this behavior if you look at a category archive page, for example. Unfortunately, there seems to be no work around for this strangeness. So if you have a page that you want to display specific categories that include sticky posts, then you have to exclude all other categories rather than include the categories you do want to show.

The “Page with Posts” per page options also let you set how the posts are displayed: Full post, Excerpt, Title Only, and number of columns. You can also selectively hide the meta info lines.