I first found the Different Posts Per Page plugin. Now, before I ever even think of installing a plugin, I read through the WordPress forums to see whether or not it would be suitable for me. Several users complained that the author of this particular plugin made them register their email address and say yes to a newsletter in order to use the plugin. I found this to be extremely annoying and didn’t even bother installing the plugin. I ended up doing a bit more reading and found that a simple line of code would solve my problem!

I simply had to run a query before the WordPress loop:

<?php query_posts($query_string.'&posts_per_page=50'); ?>

The above query allowed me to show 50 posts on that specific blog page, while all the others maintained the default of 10 posts per page. If I wanted to show all posts, I would simply replace 50 with -1.

View demo of a news ticker at TexoTela

What we need

• jQuery
• Newsticker jQuery plugin
• Twitter for WordPress plugin

Install Twitter for WordPress

1. Download the WordPress plugin from Rick’s HideOut then upload the entire folder to your wp-content/plugins folder in your WordPress directory.
2. Login to your WordPress admin panel, and go to the Plugins section. Click on Activate next to the Twitter for WordPress plugin.

Download the jQuery files

Download the latest version of jQuery and the newsticker plugin. Upload both these files to your web server.

The Markup

In your head section, we need to call jQuery as well as the newsticker plugin using the following lines of code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.newsticker.js"></script>

Following that, we will need the following lines of javascript to implement the newsticker plugin:

<script type='text/javascript'>
	$(document).ready(function(){
		$("#twitter-feed ul").newsticker();
	});
</script>

This applies the newsticker to the unordered list that will be created within our #twitter-feed div.

The next step is to create the div in which our news feed will show up. Paste the following code where you want the news ticker to appear:

<div id="twitter-feed">
	<?php twitter_messages('username', [msgs], [list]); ?>
</div>

The line of PHP in the above code calls the Twitter for WordPress plugin with the following parameters:

• username: Replace this with your twitter username
• [msgs]: The number of tweets to show (max 20, limited by Twitter)
• [list]: Whether or not to show tweets in an unordered list

For example, in order to show the last 10 tweets in an unordered list:

<?php twitter_messages('username', 10, true); ?>

It is important that we set [list] to true because the newsticker script takes each list item as a “news item”.

There are other options for the Twitter for WordPress plugin, which you can read about at Rick’s HideOut, but those parameters are not required for this tutorial.

The CSS

The last step is to add little CSS to our feed div to give the ticker some personality:

#twitter-feed{
	list-style-type: none;
	border: 1px solid #3a78b8;
	background: #d7e6f5;
	padding: 3px;
	margin: 0;
	font: 12px helvetica, arial, tahoma, sans-serif;
	}

That’s It!

As you can see, this was a very simple tutorial. Additionally, this was my first time writing a tutorial so any comments you have would be greatly appreciated.