This is an easy one, thanks to the recently updated “Query Posts” widget. The “Query Posts” widget offers you a lot more in terms of what you can use it for, so be sure to play around with all the options there.
Here is what you do:
- Do not include the standard “Recent Posts” widget in your sidebar.
- Add the “Query Posts” widget to the sidebar.
- Set the number of posts you want to display.
- Set the order to be “Descending”, and order by “Creation Date”.
- Set the “Post Display Style” to be “Thumbnail and title” or “Thumbnail, title and excerpt”.
- Pick the right size for the thumbnail and pick an excerpt length.
- Set the categories to be shown as “Any Category”
That’s it.
~Fin~
Positively thrilled with this new feature! The only thing I wish it could do is truly randomize the posts displayed, instead of just randomizing the order of the top five. Is this a possibility in the future?
I hadn’t tested that – I thought randomization takes precedence over date. If that isn’t happening it might be a WP shortcoming rather than a theme shortcoming.
You know, now that I have the widget in and am using it, I’m seeing that it’s not randomizing at all–it’s displaying the five most recent posts with the chosen tag in ascending order, even though I have it set to “random”, it’s always defaulting to the ascending. So not even the five most recent posts are randomized.
My mistake. I will fix it in the next version.
Thank you! Looking forward to it.
For some reason I try to have the Thumbnails on the bottom post query and it doesnt work how do I fix it?
Is there a way to strip the thumbnail out of the Query Posts widget? I tried using the recent post widget instead, but it doesn’t give me the option to show the post.