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Tutorial: MH Posts Digest Widget

The MH Posts Digest widget, which is included in our popular MH Magazine WordPress theme, allows to display two large featured posts with thumbnails and further posts with titles and excerpts below. This custom widget is very suitable if you are running professional news websites or online magazines with a newspaper-like style and it can be integrated nicely into your overall design.

In this tutorial we are going to show you how to manage the content of the MH Posts Digest widget to display posts from certain categories or filtered by tags. You will also learn about the widget’s appearance in different widget areas and see some layout examples. This tutorial is moreover supported by a video where you can watch each step of the way.

Widget Options – Control the widgets contents

The MH Posts Digest widget is very flexible and can be used in any of the available widget areas – full-width, 2/3 and 1/3. Thereby the widget always displays thumbnails, post titles and excerpts for its first two posts. The following posts underneath display posts titles as well as excerpts without showing thumbnails. You can display up to 50 articles using the MH Posts Digest widget.

Showing the category name for each post

The MH Posts Digest widget comes with an option included to display the category name of the particular post which is displayed. Showing the category name is especially useful if you display articles from several different categories, so readers can grasp the context just by one glance.

MH Posts Digest Widget
MH Posts Digest widget placed into full-width widget area on the front page displaying 2 posts.

Filtering posts by categories & tags

To manage the content of the MH Posts Digest widget, you can filter posts by categories or tags. To show posts from several different categories, you can simply enter the according category IDs. Here you can find more information on how to look up the category IDs: How to find WordPress category ID. Beyond that, you can make use of the several other options to determine the post count, skip a number of posts in the query or define the order of posts by latest, popular or random.

Managing excerpts and meta data

An additional option allows you to enable or disable excerpts. You can choose to display or hide the excerpts for the featured posts or for the following articles without thumbnails below. In case you don’t want to display excerpts at all, simply disable the post excerpts entirely. That way you can configure this widget to your liking and to suit into your overall website design.

By default, the widget displays meta data like date, comment count or else which is common for websites with newspaper-like style. You can disable the meta data within the theme options of your Theme Customizer under Appearance => Customize => Theme Option => Layout – Post Meta.

See the video tutorial: Widget Options – Control the widgets contents

Widget Examples – Using the widget options to create layouts

To give you an idea of what the MH Posts Digest widget could look like when it is placed in certain widget areas, we have created a short video tutorial with a couple of layout examples. Please have a look at the video and feel free to replicate our layouts or take them as inspiration to create your own.

See the video tutorial: Widget Examples – Using the widget options to create layouts

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