How To Create a Blog Page To Display Your Posts In WordPress

Sep 16, 2012

—

When you first install WordPress, you’ll notice a default theme is already installed.

The twenty eleven default theme for WordPress displays posts on your home page.

If you want to use a static page on your home page, you’ll need to create another page for your posts.

This is what’s called a blog or posts page.

Blog Page Template

To create a blog page, simply create a new page and select the blog template from the Page Attributes module in the Edit Page screen.

The name of this template may be called something different depending on the theme you are using. The blog template shown in the image above, is available in many premium themes.

Earlier i mentioned the default theme as Twenty Eleven. The latest default theme which has recently been released is named Twenty Twelve.

Twenty Twelve Default Page Template

If you’re using the twenty twelve default theme included in a new installation of WordPress, select the Default Template as your blog page.

Next step is to publish this new page which will display your recent posts and any new posts you publish will be displayed at the beginning of this page.

If you’re wanting to use a static page as your homepage, you’ll need to configure the reading settings. Otherwise, you can simply create a custom menu link and add your new blog page link to your navigation menu.

Reading Settings

Next step is to navigate to Settings > Reading and select the new page you have created to be displayed as your Posts page.

From the Reading Settings page, you can also choose how many posts to be displayed on your new blog page.

You can also create a page for your homepage and select it from your reading settings as well.

Displaying Posts On Homepage & Blog Page

Some sites display a list post excerpts on the homepage as well as on a separate blog page.

This means they have 2 post pages.

If you do this, be sure to ‘no follow’ and ‘no index’ one of them so you don’t suffer from duplicate content issues.

Conclusion

Don’t forget that different themes offer different page templates.

The default page template included in premium themes isn’t the same as the default page template included in many free themes.

Comments

4 responses to “How To Create a Blog Page To Display Your Posts In WordPress”

James Kirk

September 17, 2012

It should be noted, Brad, that if the site admin is not using a premium theme that deals with showing posts on a page separate from using the “static front page” from the “Settings>>Reading” tab, it really doesn’t matter what page template they might use for the “blog page”.

WordPress will not pay any attention to the actual page template the “blog page” is using and instead simply shows that URL /blog-page as the container for listing the blog posts.

Log in to Reply
1. Brad Dalton
  
  September 17, 2012
  
  Thanks for the note James!
  
  I’ll need to write more on this topic i think.
  
  Log in to Reply
  1. James Kirk
    
    September 18, 2012
    
    No, the pleasure is all mine, Brad. The only reason I know about this one specifically is I had a client that wanted some very specific information to display in the sidebar’s of the both the “/blog” page (the same page you are discussing in this article) and the actual single.php page. Creating the sidebars for the single post’s display, easy. But it was through trial and error I discovered that in fact, no, I could not use the Reading Settings to simply display the list of posts on the page I chose with that admin setting.
    
    In the end, the only way around this was to create a special template page from scratch which called the specific sidebar to display on the /blog page, as well as displaying posts from the loop in the main content area.
    
    So, can be done, however, not quite as simply as we might hope by checking that box and choosing the page from the drop down.
    
    Cheers! 🙂
    
    Log in to Reply
    1. Brad Dalton
      
      September 18, 2012
      
      That’s normally how i learn the ins and outs of WordPress as well. When you have to jump in the deep end and work things out by playing around with it, you learn how it really works.
      
      Log in to Reply

Join 5000+ Followers

Get The Latest Free & Premium Tutorials Delivered The Second They’re Published.