How to show 5 posts from specific category on related page?

Question

I'm not familiar enough with wordpress to ask the question directly, so please bare with me as I explain what I'm looking for.

I have four primary sections of my business (A, B, C & D, for example).

• each section has it's own page
• each section also has a category with the same name
• various pages and posts are categorized under each section

I want an area in the sidebar (probably a widget) to show N (probably ~5) summaries of items categorized as A on page A. And the same on pages B, C & D.

Remembering that I am a Drupal developer who does not know the Wordpress landscape very well, how would I go about this? Is there a ready-built widget or am I looking at something custom?

Answer 1

You can use this plugin http://wordpress.org/plugins/posts-in-sidebar/screenshots/

and use widget logic to display particular category posts http://wordpress.org/plugins/widget-logic/screenshots/

Please add is_page('A') in widget logic section Then select posts form category A in posts in sidebar

Answer 2

I would probably ditch categories and use the Parent field which is for establishing a hierarchical relationship between pages. You'd then use WP_Query to make a custom loop outputting your summaries.

You'd end up with something like this:

<?php $related_posts = new WP_Query( array(
    'post_type' => 'page',
    'posts_per_page' => 5,
    'post_parent' => $post->ID
));
if( $related_posts->have_posts() ) : while( $related_posts->have_posts() ) : $related_posts->the_post(); ?>
    <article class="hentry">
        <h1 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
        <div class="entry-summary"><?php the_excerpt(); ?></div>
    </article>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

Categories could work and you'd just need to use a different query, but the Parent field is made for this exact purpose. It lives for this. I could also imagine a solution using menus to manage the relationship, but I like Parent still.

If you want this to be a widget, it wouldn't take much to wrap this up as a widget.