How to call most recent post to static homepage with excerpt of text

JohanSmal

Good day. I was wondering how I would go about placing the title, date and an excerpt from the most recent post on my website onto the static homepage. Please help.

P.s. I've tried to use the Muffin Recent Posts widget, but it doesn't allow for an excerpt of the text.

JohanSmal

Ok I've figured it out.

I've installed the plugin "PHP Code for Posts", then created two snippets of PHP code within the plugin - one to display the date under a generic heading ("Latest News"), and the other to display an excerpt of the text.

PHP code for the first snippet:

<?php the_date(); ?>

PHP code for the second snippet:

<?php $the_query = new WP_Query( 'posts_per_page=1' ); ?>

<?php while ($the_query -> have_posts()) : $the_query -> the_post(); ?>

<?php the_excerpt(__('(more…)')); ?>

<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>">Read more...</a>

<?php 

endwhile;

wp_reset_postdata();

?>

BUT NOW:

I want to increase the amount of words included in the excerpt. Any idea how I can do that?

JohanSmal

Figured it out again.

I had to add the following code (which I got from the Wordpress support reference) to the functions.php file:

function wpdocs_custom_excerpt_length( $length ) {

return 100;

}

add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'wpdocs_custom_excerpt_length', 999 );

The 100 can be changed to anything you like.