Day 19: Creating a Blog Within a WordPress Site

One of the great advantages of working with WordPress is that it has a blogging platform built right in. Some would argue that this is because WordPress is a blogging platform but I disagree. WordPress is a content management system that in its past used to be a blogging platform. But that’s and argument that is a total waste of time. The only thing that really matters is this: You can use WordPress to build a site with multiple posts, categories and other content and still have a blog inside it. And on this 19th Day of WordPress I’ll show you how.

What do you mean “a blog inside it”?

Let me explain myself here so it’s clear what I’m talking about. Imagine you are building a site for an illustrator. The site has four static pages (front page, about page, CV, and contact) and she also has a series of posts stored under categories including portfolio, articles and tutorials, each with sub-categories. But in addition to these non-blog posts she wants a section on her site called “blog” where she can post all the stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

To get all this to work we need to set up a new category called “Blog” with however many sub-categories she wants, create a page called “Blog” on which to display the blog index page and finally limit the posts displayed on the blog page to only posts listed under the Blog category or its children. So let’s get started.

Setting it up

Logged into WordPress create a new page called Blog. Don’t put any content in the page as it will be used as the blog index page.

With the new Blog page published go to Settings -> Reading, set Front page displays to A static page and select your home page (whatever it is) as your Front page and the Blog page as the Posts page (remember to hit Save Changes).

Displaying only posts from the Blog category

To get WordPress to only display posts from the Blog category on the blog index page you need to add a query to the index.php file. The query first checks if this is indeed the blog page (is_home) and then restricts the posts displayed only to those posts in the Blog category (using the slug “blog”) or its children:

If you want to use the category ID instead you can do so by changing the variable in the query like this (assuming the category ID in question is 3):

The query_posts() function has a lot of varialbes and there are tons of cool things you can do with it so I recommend checking out the WordPress Codex page for the function as a way to expand your coding horizons.

This tutorial is part of the 24 Days of WordPress series. If you want to learn more about WordPress and Expression Web check out the Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Expression Web in 24 Hours series (version 2, 3 and 4), Lynda.com’s WordPress 3.0 Essential Training course and Microsoft Expression Web 4 LiveLessons.