Front page with static content and blog excerpts

  • I would like to have a front page with static content followed by blog excerpts.

    I read somewhere that to make this work you just have to create a page that will serve as static content, plus a blank page that will serve to publish the blog posts. So, under “Static Page” I ticked “A static page” and selected the front page I have created. Under “Posts Page” I chose the blank page I have created called “Articles” . However, my front page just shows the static content and that’s all. I also ticked “Show blog feed to show excerpts”, but no blog posts show up on the front page, neither complete, nor excerpts.

    How do I make this work to have both the static content and the blog excerpts show up on the front page. I know there’s a way to do this, but don’t remember exactly how, and even less so how to do this in Twenty Fourteen, or through this plugin.
    Thanks in advance for your help!

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/fourteen-extended/

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Author Brian Harris

    (@zgani)

    Hi Cath,

    Unfortunately that’s not how WordPress works with those settings. What it all means is WordPress will display the set front page as a static page and only with that page’s content. And it’ll then render the blog feed on a separate page i.e. the blank page you created and selected.

    There are two ways to achieve what you are looking for

    1) Is to have a custom template that has custom queries in it – one query for the static content and the second query for the blog feed. This is the hard option.

    2) You can use a plugin that allows to pull the blog feed in to the static page. A plugin like: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/posts-to-page/ would do the trick. This is the easy option and the good thing is it has a few good parameters you can use to format the output. The only draw back I know if, the content is output in accordance of what the theme loop is – so you only get either the full post or the excerpt and in the case of Twenty Fourteen its full post.

    Hopefully that helps answer your query and of some use ??

    Regards,
    Zulf

    Thread Starter Cath22

    (@cath22)

    Thanks much for the two suggestions!
    I may be mistaken but I think that what I described was possible with Twenty Eleven (without extra coding or plugin)…
    Anyway, in the mean-time and for now, I solved it by putting the ‘static content’ into a text widget into the content sidebar (making it appear only on the front page) and keeping the blog post excerpts as the main content on the front page. This way I have the ‘static content’ on the right instead of at the top, but apart from that it pretty much looks like what I was looking for.
    Now I am going to dig a little bit deeper into your suggestions.
    Thanks again for these great plug-ins (both Styles: TwentyFourteen and Fourteen extended) and for the awesome support!

    Plugin Author Brian Harris

    (@zgani)

    You are most welcome Cath.

    Never really did work much with Twenty Eleven – I think I’ll take a look at it to see if I can get some ideas from it, would come handy for a child theme.

    Mind you, your widget idea has given food for thoughts too. Maybe that could also be implemented in a child with a custom widget sitting right above the blog posts? – I’ll see if I can work that in to Sequel ??

    Please feel free to drop by anytime even if its to make a suggestion or two ??

    Regards,
    Zulf

    Thread Starter Cath22

    (@cath22)

    PLEASE keep me posted if you come up with a solution to put a content widget area on top of the blog excerpts on the front page. ??

    Would it be possible to obtain that same result with the “Quote” or “Status” post formats? Currently, if one selects the “Gallery” post format this automatically positions this post in the right content sidebar. Could it be possible to do the same thing for “Quote” and “Status” post formats, making them appear in the content side bar or as a sticky part above the blog post excerpts? As far as I know that’s how they were supposed to work in previous Twenty themes (at least in Eleven and Twelve), but in Fourteen the Quote appears in the Featured post grid, instead of in (or on top of) the blog post excerpts.

    By the way, the “Status” post format has disappeared from the Fourteen theme. Is that something you could add back via the Fourteen Extended plugin? I may be wrong, but it seems that Fourteen offers less possibilities with the different post formats than Twenty Eleven. That’s maybe an area that could be ‘extended’? ??

    IMHO, Twenty Eleven was really a great theme, which offered many more possibilities than expected at first sight (even featured posts). Fourteen is the first new theme that seems to offer really new lay-out possibilities, and it’s fun to work with, but some options seem also to have disappeared. I am not a programmer, but having a closer look at the options of Twenty Eleven might indeed bring up new ideas to further extend Fourteen and combine the best of two worlds. ??

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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