Joseph Hinson

Do you have a lot of categories and are sick of having a huge list in your sidebar? Want to highlight only a few of them to make your site easier to navigate?
While redesigning WordPress sites for our clients we kept running into this problem over and over. They had a huge list of legacy categories but only wanted to highlight a few of them. We wrote this plugin to allow them to select which categories to show and which categories to initially hide.
All categories are still accessible by a “see all” link at the bottom of the list.
Add the widget to your sidebar to make it live.

Category Expander

Allows WordPress Admins to show only a selected few categories on the sidebar and hide the rest from view until visitor clicks "See All".

Fernando Briano

zymeth25

List Category Posts allows you to list posts by category in a post or page using the <code>[catlist]</code> shortcode. When you’re editing a page or post, directly insert the shortcode in your text and the posts will be listed there. The basic usage would be something like this:
<pre><code>[catlist id=1]

[catlist name="news"]
</code></pre>
The shortcode accepts a category name or id, the order in which you want the posts to display, and the number of posts to display. You can also display the post author, date, excerpt, custom field values, even the content! A lot of parameters have been added to customize what to display and how to show it. Check <a href="https://github.com/picandocodigo/List-Category-Posts/wiki" rel="nofollow ugc">the full documentation</a> to learn about the different ways to use it.
The <code>[catlist]</code> shortcode can be used as many times as needed with different arguments on each post/page. 
 [catlist id=1 numberposts=10]
There’s an options page with a few options, new options will be implemented on demand (as long as they make sense).
<a href="https://github.com/picandocodigo/List-Category-Posts/wiki" rel="nofollow ugc">Read the instructions</a> to learn which parameters are available and how to use them.
If you want to List Categories instead of posts you can use my other plugin <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/list-categories/" rel="ugc">List categories</a>.
You can find Frequently Asked Questions <a href="https://github.com/picandocodigo/List-Category-Posts/blob/master/doc/FAQ.md#frequently-asked-questions" rel="nofollow ugc">here</a>.
Customization
The different elements to display can be styled with CSS. you can define an HTML tag to wrap the element with, and a CSS class for this tag. Check <a href="https://github.com/picandocodigo/List-Category-Posts/wiki" rel="nofollow ugc">the documentation</a> for usage. You can also check <a href="http://sundari-webdesign.com/wordpress-the-quest-to-my-perfect-list-view-for-posts-events-and-articles/" rel="nofollow ugc">this nice tutorial</a> which gives lots of tips and how-to’s to customize how to display the posts.
Great to use WordPress as a CMS, and create pages with several categories posts.
GUI
Klemens Starybrat has created a GUI for List Category Posts. It helps you create a shortcode from a nice visual interface in WordPress’ text editor. Check it out: 
<a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/gui-for-lcp/" rel="ugc">GUI for List Category Posts</a>
AJAX pagination
The ajax pagination feature is maintained in an add-on plugin by Klemens Starybrat. Check it out: 
<a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/lcp-ajax-pagination" rel="ugc">LCP Ajax Pagination</a>
Widget
Since WordPress 4.9, <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2017/10/24/widget-improvements-in-wordpress-4-9/" rel="nofollow ugc">you can use shortcode in text widgets</a>. So you can just add a text widget in Appearence > Widgets and write the List Category Posts shortcode.
The plugin also includes a widget as a simple interface for its functionality. Just add as many widgets as you want, and select all the available options from the Appearence > Widgets page. Not all the functionality in the shortcode has been implemented in the widget yet. You can use the shortcode for the most flexibility.
Please, read the information on <a href="https://github.com/picandocodigo/List-Category-Posts/wiki" rel="nofollow ugc">the wiki</a> and <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/list-category-posts/#developers" rel="ugc">Changelog</a> to be aware of new functionality, and improvements to the plugin.
Videos
Some users have made videos on how to use the plugin (thank you, you are awesome!), check them out here:
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBy_qoGKpdo" rel="nofollow ugc">Manage WordPress Content with List Category Posts Plugin</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zfnzk4IWPNA" rel="nofollow ugc">WordPress: How to List Category Posts on a Page</a></li>
</ul>
Support the plugin
Klemens Starybrat has been writing lots of amazing code for this plugin, so if you’ve found it useful and want to pay it forward, consider sponsoring him on GitHub: https://github.com/sponsors/klemens-st
I have a <a href="http://picandocodigo.net/programacion/wordpress/list-category-posts-wordpress-plugin-english/#support" title="Donate via PayPal" rel="nofollow ugc">PayPal account</a> where you can donate too.
Development
Development is being tracked on <a href="https://codeberg.org/picandocodigo/list-category-posts" rel="nofollow ugc">Codeberg</a> and <a href="https://github.com/picandocodigo/List-Category-Posts" rel="nofollow ugc">GitHub</a>. Fork it, code, make a pull request, suggest improvements, etc. over there. I dream of the day all of the WordPress plugins will be hosted on Git 🙂
Since the documentation on how to use the plugin has passed wordpress.org’s character limit, the text was cut. You can find the complete documentation on <a href="https://github.com/picandocodigo/List-Category-Posts/wiki" rel="nofollow ugc">the wiki</a>. It’s also more comfortable to read and maintain than a txt file. Please check it out, suggestions are welcome on Codeberg/GitHub issues!
<h3>Instructions on how to use the plugin</h3>
Below you can find common shortcode use cases. You can use the shortcode while editing posts, pages, custom post types, text widgets and in all “page builder” plugins that support shortcodes.
Read the <a href="https://github.com/picandocodigo/List-Category-Posts/wiki" rel="nofollow ugc">full documentation</a> to discover many more features, including:
<ul>
<li>advanced post selection options (by date, search terms, custom fields, post types, custom taxonomies and more)</li>
<li>output customizations (show each post’s date, author, excerpt, thumbnail and more)</li>
<li>custom templates of your own design, based on a simple PHP example</li>
</ul>
List 10 latest posts:
<pre><code>[catlist]
</code></pre>
The default number of listed posts is 10, to modify it you need to specify <code>numberposts</code> parameter:
<pre><code>[catlist numberposts=15]
</code></pre>
List posts from the “Dogs” category:
<pre><code>[catlist name=Dogs]
</code></pre>
List posts from the category with id <code>2</code>:
<pre><code>[catlist id=2]
</code></pre>
By default only the “post” post type is included. To list pages use:
<pre><code>[catlist post_type=page]
</code></pre>
and for both posts and pages:
<pre><code>[catlist post_type="post,page"]
</code></pre>
If we combine the above options we can get a shortcode that lists 15 items, including post and pages, from the “Dogs” category:
<pre><code>[catlist name=Dogs post_type="post,page" numberposts=15]
</code></pre>
Most of the parameters you will find in the documentation can be used together.
The plugin can detect current post’s category and use it for listing:
<pre><code>[catlist categorypage=yes]
</code></pre>
Same goes for tags:
<pre><code>[catlist currenttags=yes]
</code></pre>
To show each post’s excerpt use:
<pre><code>[catlist excerpt=yes]
</code></pre>
If you want to show the date, author and comments count next to each post, use:
<pre><code>[catlist date=yes author=yes comments=yes]
</code></pre>
You can specify html tags and classes for many elements. Let’s modify the previous shortcode and wrap dates and authors in tags and classes of our choice:
<pre><code>[catlist date=yes date_tag=span date_class="my-date" author=yes author_tag=p author_class="my-author" comments=yes]
</code></pre>
<a href="https://github.com/picandocodigo/List-Category-Posts/wiki/HTML-&-CSS-Customization" rel="nofollow ugc">Read more about this feature</a>
You can order posts by date:
<pre><code>[catlist orderby=date]
</code></pre>
You can also use <code>title</code>, <code>author</code>, <code>ID</code>. More options are described in the documentation.
The plugin also supports pagination. You need to specify <code>numberposts</code> to tell the plugin how many posts per page you want:
<pre><code>[catlist pagination=yes numberposts=5]
</code></pre>
See the wiki: <a href="https://github.com/picandocodigo/List-Category-Posts/wiki/Pagination" rel="nofollow ugc">Pagination</a> for more information.
Please read the <a href="https://github.com/picandocodigo/List-Category-Posts/wiki" rel="nofollow ugc">full documentation</a> for detailed documentation of all plugin features, use cases and shortcode parameters.

List category posts

Thanks for this plugin. It does exactly what I need and works flawlessly.

Exactly right for what I need

Very customizable plugin to list posts by category (or tag, author and more) in a post, page or widget. Uses the [catlist] shortcode to select posts.

Category Expander vs List category posts