On my photography site, I display a list of the last 5 blog posts in the footer on all pages. I use the rss feed to get the most recent posts outside of the wordpress environment.

This is how I do it using phplugins:

function dlp_get_latest_blog_posts( $limit, $link ){
   $result = '<ul>';
   $rss = new DOMDocument();
   $rss->load($link);
   $feed = array();
   foreach ($rss->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
      $item = array ( 
         'title' => $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue,
         'link' => $node->getElementsByTagName('link')->item(0)->nodeValue,
      );
      array_push($feed, $item);
   }
   for($x=0;$x<$limit;$x++) {
      $title = str_replace(' & ', ' &amp; ', $feed[$x]['title']);
      $link = $feed[$x]['link'];
      $result .= '<li><a href="'.$link.'" title="'.$title.'">'.$title.'</a></li>';
   }
   $result .= '</ul>';
   return $result;
}

And then I can call $this->dlp_get_latest_blog_posts(10, ‘my-link’) wherever I would like to show a list of the 10 most recent blog posts. For this lab site, I use

function pallet02_top() {
   if ($this->dlp_page_match('/blog')) {
      // don't show custom right sidebar on blog pages
      return true;
   } else {
      // Recent posts
      echo '
         <div id="recent-posts-3" class="widget widget_recent_entries">
            <h2 class="widget-title">Recent Posts</h2>
            '.$this->dlp_get_latest_blog_posts(5, "https://lab.danielleu.com/blog/feed/").'
         </div>
      ';	  
   }
}

I only show my custom sidebar on my non-blog pages. That’s why I filter them using my page match function dlp_page_match:

function dlp_page_match($page) {
   if (substr($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"], 0, strlen($page)) == $page) {
      return 1;
   }  else {
      return 0;
   }
}

Please note that dlp_page_match must be placed before the pallet02_top function.

If you like to see only blog posts matching a category, just set the url as “your-domain.com/blog/category/category-name/feed/”.

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