Best Practice for Displaying Categorized Posts on Front Page

Question

I am building a custom wordpress theme from a clients mockup. On the homepage there are 2 sliders, and 4-5 areas for recent posts of different types. I would like to have all the content be editable in wordpress what is the best way to create a post, apply some sortof value to it (category,taxonomy,tag,custom post type), and then retrieve more than one loop on a single page or is it best to use feeds? Any suggestions greatly appreciated

Answer 1

You can use WP_Query in your template to select groups of posts by type, category, tag, custom taxonomy, meta field, etc., and create additional loops:

<?php   
$news = new WP_Query("post_type=mynews&posts_per_page=1");
while($news->have_posts()) : $news->the_post();
    the_title();
endwhile;

$events = new WP_Query("cat=2&posts_per_page=3");
while($events->have_posts()) : $events->the_post();
    the_title();
endwhile;

// etc..

It's up to you how to best organize your content in a way that makes sense as far as how you use your taxonomies and types.

Answer 2

I agree with Milo. Personally, I would create custom post types (see Justin Tadlock's page for starters: http://justintadlock.com/archives/2010/04/29/custom-post-types-in-wordpress)

Then you can create different loops and queries in whatever format you're comfortable with and display content from different areas wherever you require. Alternatively if the content is very similar, you can just create different categories and instruct your client that Category X posts are for the 1st slider, Category Y posts go to the recent news, etc.