Talk In Code

You can display your latest WordPress posts anywhere on your site by using an RSS reader called SimplePie and a few lines of code. SimplePie is a fast and efficient RSS reader, and it will also cache feeds to reduce the amount of processing time taken.

Download simple pie from the website and upload the simplepie.inc file to your web server. Next include the following section of code anywhere on your site that you want to display the latest post on.

<?php
require_once('simplepie.inc');
 
$feed = new SimplePie();
$feed->set_feed_url('http://www.example.com/feed');
 
$feed->init();
 
echo '<ul>';
 
// Limit the items to be shown
$i = 1;
foreach($feed->get_items() as $item){
 if($i<3){
  echo '<li><a href="'.$item->get_permalink().'">'.$item->get_title().'</a><br />'. "\n";
  echo substr($item->get_description(),0,180).'...</li>'."\n";
  $i++;
 }
}
echo '</ul>';
?>

You can also pull out categories by setting the feed URL to something like this.

http://www.example.co.uk/category/example/feed

This will allow you to display a page will posts from different categories.

Of course you can use this technique on any RSS generating blog platform, it doesn’t have to be WordPress, but it is much better than trying to figure out database connections and the like.