Wordpress is a great platform for blogging, i thinks majority of the bloggers use wordpress. Wordpress is not only for blogs it can be used as a CMS for small businesses or for news portals. Wordpress ease of use, nice list of features and a simple and powerful administration is ideal for anybody to use it as their publishing platform.

I am developing a news portal using wordpress, i thought i will share with you what and how i am doing it, this may help some of you probably. When i started working on it i realised that there are not so many resources available in this direction and another problem is that its hard to find themes for these type of sites.

First and foremost thing is to design a front page layout, i am not so good at PHP so i completely relied on Google and Wordpress Codex. Here i will tell you step by step how to get a news site design using wordpress multiple loops function.

We don’t want our home page to look like a typical blog with posts arranged chronologically, i want to show one featured article, and 3 other articles on the home page top section arranged in 2 columns.

Below is the code used for this layout (look here for the text file with this code).

Featured article (Please change the CSS classes in the code)


<?php $posts = get_posts( "category=1&numberposts=1" ); ?>

<?php if( $posts ) : ?>

<?php foreach( $posts as $post ) : setup_postdata( $post ); ?>

<h2<<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

<?php the_content("Continue reading '" . the_title('', '', false) . "'"); ?>

<span class="chronodata"><?php the_time('F j, Y'); ?></span> | <span class="commentlink"><?php comments_popup_link('Leave a Comment', '1 Comment', '% Comments'); ?></span>

<?php endforeach; ?>

<?php endif; ?></code>