Creating a Page for Last 100 Posts in your WordPress Site

Because she’s #ds106 #4life and an awesome grandma…

#ds106 I'm looking for a way in WP to add a page that shows all of my blog posts. HELP? @cogdog @timmmmyboy http://t.co/CFxbAwhm6y

— Rochelle Lockridge (@Rockylou22) August 25, 2013

I do have one of these on CogDogBlog- mainly because I wanted a reference way to be able to grab the links to my own posts when I write new ones. The way I did it is a bit arcane (especially since I did it like 4 years ago), but here is a method that should work for anyone with a self hosted WordPress site.

(1) Make a copy of your template’s page.php file and name it something like page-last100.php.

(2) At the very top, above everything else add:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Last 100 Posts
*/
?>

<?php

Template Name: Last 100 Posts

Doing this allows this to appear as am optional template in your WordPress Page editor.

(3) In this file, find the part where it reads:

<?php the_content(); ?>

1	<?php the_content(); ?>

Newer templates might have something like

get_template_part( 'content', 'page' );

1	get_template_part( 'content', 'page' );

The point is you will be able to put whatever introduction you want into a page you will create; and we will add after it the code to run through your last 100 posts.

(4) Just below the area you found in the above step, add this php code. What it does is run a new database query to find the last 100 posts, and echo a list of them.

<!-- start list of past posts -->
<ol>

<?php $my_100_query = new WP_Query('posts_per_page=100'); // for all posts use -1	?>

<?php while ( $my_100_query->have_posts() ) {
	$my_100_query->the_post();
?>

<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>""><?php the_title(); ?></a> published <?php the_time('M j, Y h:ia') ?>  <?php edit_post_link(' Edit', '<img src="' . get_bloginfo('template_directory')  . '/images/edit.gif" alt="" align="absmiddle" /> ', ''); ?></li>

<?php 
}  // -- last 100 query ?>

<?php wp_reset_query(); // reset main query ?>

</ol>
<!-- end list of past posts -->

<ol>

<?php $my_100_query = new WP_Query('posts_per_page=100'); // for all posts use -1 ?>

<?php while ( $my_100_query->have_posts() ) {

$my_100_query->the_post();

<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>""><?php the_title(); ?></a> published <?php the_time('M j, Y h:ia') ?> <?php edit_post_link(' Edit', '<img src="' . get_bloginfo('template_directory') . '/images/edit.gif" alt="" align="absmiddle" /> ', ''); ?></li>

<?php

} // -- last 100 query ?>

<?php wp_reset_query(); // reset main query ?>

</ol>

For added flair, my code puts a little pencil icon on the link that gets you to edit the post (this will appear only for logged in users with edit capabilities). To get the pencil, just create a directory in your theme file called “images” (if it does not exist already), and download my pencil graphic and put in that directory.

(5) Upload this to your active wordpress theme directory.

(6) Create a new WordPress Page- give it ant title you like, and write what you want to be as the introduction to the page:

(7) On the right side, under the box for Page Attributes, select Last 1oo Posts under the Templates menu.

(8) Publish

You should get something like this version of my last 100 posts page .Mine has a few bits of post content stuff (the creative commons statement, and social sharing) which would take a more advanced lesson to overcome. But this should provide some insight how you can change page templates.