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I want to build a homepage where I can show posts gathered from different categories and having the ability to choose such categories from the admin. I was thinking to use widgets for this. Is the right choice or is there a better way to do it?

I've found this plugin which seems to do what I need, but if possible I would prefer avoiding the use of a plugin.

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  • You can do this in several ways, you can weather create a dedicated template that would suit your needs. You could declare dynamic sidebar zones and use widgets or directly get your desired posts with some WP_Queries
    – Sladix
    Commented Nov 17, 2015 at 9:52
  • I don't want to show the posts in a sidebar, but in the content of the page. Can I declare a dynamic zone in there? And I know about WP_Queries, but how can I control them from the admin panel?
    – Carlo
    Commented Nov 17, 2015 at 9:59
  • @PieterGoosen thanks, that is interesting, but if I understood it correctly, it's not really what I meant
    – Carlo
    Commented Nov 17, 2015 at 11:01
  • I can maybe try it later, but it seems he's tying a single category to a specific page, using one common page template. I want to show several categories in a single page
    – Carlo
    Commented Nov 17, 2015 at 11:08
  • I've done something very similar here ottawacitizen.com with a back end that lets you select multiple lists from multiple sources including external feeds. If you want to this far in, get ready to do a lot of coding or download a plugin.
    – Juniper Jones
    Commented Feb 8, 2016 at 14:01

1 Answer 1

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In order to register dynamic zones, you can follow theses steps :

  • Create a template for your home page
  • Assign that template to a page
  • Define that page as the Home page in Settings->reading
  • Register sidebar in your functions.php by using this function
  • Call the sidebar in your home template

In order to call your sidebar, use dynamic_sidebar. So if you named your sidebar with the id "home-sidebar-1", you can call it this way :

<?php dynamic_sidebar('home-sidebar-1') ?>

You can add as many sidebar as you have declared in your functions.php

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  • so, just to be sure: even if the function is called dynamic_sidebar, I can use it also for the main content, not just in a sidebar, right?
    – Carlo
    Commented Nov 17, 2015 at 10:15
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    Yes, you can call dynamic_sidebar anywhere you want. The zones will be editables in apparence->widgets. But you can't call dynamic_sidebar in the wysiwyg editor
    – Sladix
    Commented Nov 17, 2015 at 10:32
  • that's fine. This is exactly what I needed
    – Carlo
    Commented Nov 17, 2015 at 10:38

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