Overview
The custom news page template is more flexible than the WordPress default option. The custom template allows you to create a page that lists all of the news posts in every category, or all news posts in a specific category. You can enable the template on multiple pages, allowing you to create multiple archive pages — each containing news from only a single category.
Enabling the custom News Page template will give you access to an additional settings box on that page. This template is only available on a per-page basis (not sitewide).
The content on this page will display in this manner:
- The title of your page will display as the content heading.
- You are not required to put any page content in the editor. If you put content (text, images, etc.) in the editor, that content appears on the page below the heading and above the new listings.
- The news post listings are displayed next. They are displayed based on the settings you specify in a separate box on the page, below the editor.
- Only the number of news posts you specify will appear on each page. If you have more news posts than the number specified, the template will automatically paginate (create more than one page in) your news archives, and add a navigation menu at the bottom of the news post listing, similar to this:
Settings for News Post Listings
To activate the custom news template on a page, open the page in the WordPress editor and change the Page Template. For BU default themes, the custom news page template is named News. For the BUMC theme, the custom news page template is named Custom News Page.
After activating the custom news template and saving the page, scroll below your page content editor to locate the Settings for News Post Listing box. Select the settings you want and save your page again.
Options for these settings are described below.
- News Post Category – Select either All Categories or one specific category from the selection menu. The number in parentheses following the category name is the number of news posts published in that category.
- Number of Posts per Page – Select the number of posts you want to appear on each page from the menu.
- Show – Title is a required option. You can also show or hide the post author, the news post date, assigned categories and tags, and a headline thumbnail if one is available. You can select from three different thumbnail sizes. Specifying a thumbnail here requires that you use the Headline Thumbnail plugin.
- Content Display – This setting determines how your news post page content is shown. Select one of the three options:
- None — select this if you want to display only title, date and/or category.
- Auto-excerpt — select this and specify a number. The first xx number of words in your news posts will be displayed as the excerpt.
- Full Content — select this and the entire news post will be displayed, unless you have used the “More” tag in your posts. See the help page about using the More tag.
