Expressing IT

I thought this one will be a doodle to find in google, as many you us UI and script writers would need to do this on a day to day basis, that is include a bit of peice of PHP code snippet(.php) into a Smarty Template (.tpl).  I realized that easier/popular  your query, even more difficult to find the exact answer…   a million search results but most of them reffered to “file” includes in Smarty … which has the following syntax

    {include file=”include/header.php”}

This actually inlcuded the file fine but as text , What I wanted was the result of  included file .(Note the above is used include template inside a template file). Finally with a bit persiverance …. I stumbled across a slighty modified syntax, which was the answer to my requirement … so here it is… if you havn’t found  one already

{include_php file=”include/header.php” }

This question crossed my mind a few times before, when I was working on sites earlier too, which used WordPress to show blogs or new kind of content in some part of the site/portal.Being a novice in PHP and around WordPress, I kept procastinating it, thinking ” this isnt my peice of cake”. Finally! this requirement came upto my nose, when started diggin around a bit for solution.
I was surprised to find that it really was easier than I actually thought it was, to display a list of headlines or the latest post on any other page outside of the Wordpress-powered section, just using a little bit of PHP and the Wordpress API.

Here is what to do :-
For reasons of explanation, assume that your site is http://www.inchembur.com/ and you have the news section for this site on http://news.inchembur.com/ ( which is running WordPress). Now the requirement is to show the latest post from http://news.inchembur.com/ on the home page of the main site ,i.e. http://www.inchembur.com/index.php

Step1: In your index.php add the following peice of code , Include the Wordpress API file. You can add this to the top of the page you want your post to appear on.

<?php
define(‘WP_USE_THEMES’, false); // Disbable use of Wordpress Theme
require (‘/var/news.inchembur.com/wp-blog-header.php’); // Include Wordpress API
query_posts(’showposts=1′); // Get Latest Post
?>

In the above peice of include , we are getting only the single most recent post. if you want to try more variations feel free to dig into, query_posts() documentation .

Step 2: Now, In the part of the Index/Home page where you want to show the latest Wordpress post from http://news.inchembur.com , use the following code. Needless to say, feel free to ad your styling divisions, spans and classes as per your design needs.

Step3 : There is no Step 3 … Thats it … you are done!

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OfCourse, You can try a few variations as per your requirements ( as I mentioned earlier, refer to query_posts() documentation ) . Heres some taster …

How show a specific post/page as opposed to the latest post:-
This can easily achived by altering the arguments to query_posts() to include the page ID or page slug

query_posts(‘page_id=7′);
query_posts(‘pagename=about’);

or You can control the number of posts:
query_posts(showposts=3);