The Unique Posts block gives you a way to list posts on a page. You can get all the posts in a certain category, with a certain tag, etc. — and you can decide what to show for each one (title, image, author, date, etc.).
The distinguishing feature of the Unique Posts block is that, as the name implies, you can make it only show posts on the page once.
- For example, if a post is in the “Top News” and “Featured News” categories, you could have one block on the page showing Top News and one showing Featured News, but by using Unique Posts you could make sure that no posts show up in both places on the page.
- This feature only works with multiple Unique Posts blocks on the same page – if you show posts using another kind of block, Unique Posts might still duplicate them
- Whichever block comes first will show the post, then subsequent blocks on the same page check to make sure that each post they show has not been shown on the page in another Unique Posts block.
First, click the Add button
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Select the Unique Posts block (you can start typing the name to filter the list of blocks)
Once the Unique Posts block is added, you can adjust the settings in the panel on the right of the page
Filters section
- Post types
Select the types of posts that this block will show - Categories
The block will show posts that have any of the categories selected here - Exclude categories
The block will not show posts that have any of these categories, even if those posts would otherwise be shown - Tags
The block will show posts that have any of the tags selected here - Exclude tags
The block will not show posts that have any of these tags, even if those posts would otherwise be shown - Number of items
The total items to list in this block - Number of items to offset
Skip this many posts before the first one that the block shows - Sort order
Set whether the newest posts or oldest posts meeting all these criteria should be shown first. - Unique posts
When this is set to “yes,” this block will not show any posts that were shown earlier in the page by another Unique Posts block.
Optional: pagination settings
Important: to enable pagination, you must set the “Unique posts” setting to No
- Show more pages
Enable pagination links to page through more posts that meet the filter criteria, like this:
- Page links at top?
If this is set to “Yes” those page links will be shown at the beginning of the block (they are always shown at the end of the block, after the list of posts) - Top page links on first page
If you’re showing page links at the top of the block, you can decide not to show them on the first page of post results by setting this to No. Setting this to Yes will show pagination links at the top of the first page too.
Fields section
This section controls which information from each post to display.
- Show post title
Show the title of the post - Headline size
The number corresponds to the HTML headline tags (h2, h3, h4, h5, h6).
Higher numbers mean a smaller headline (i.e., a 6 here is the smallest and a 2 is the biggest) - Show post author
- Show post date
- Never – hide the date on every post
- Always – show the date on every post
- Only newer posts/Only older posts – selecting one of these shows the controls below to set a cutoff a certain amount of time before the block is displayed. Only posts newer/older than that cutoff will have date shown on them.
- Show featured image
- If you turn show featured image to “Hide,” you will have the option to Show featured image for first post, which shows the featured image only for the first post in the block and none of the others (often used at the top of a column of stories, for example)
- If Show featured image is set to “Show,” then you can select two more options:
- Featured image source lets you select which field from the post to use – the normal Featured image, or the custom crop version for the home page (which will always be a consistent aspect ratio)
- Featured image size lets you choose the pixel dimensions of the image (in general you want to use the smallest image possible because big ones take longer to download)
- Show post excerpt
- Include “read more” link shows a text link at the end of the post saying “read more”
- If you set this to Yes, then you get a text field with the option to customize what that text link says
- Show audio player is designed to work with the podcasting settings for the individual post
Layout section
The layout section controls layout for the elements shown by each post
- Featured image alignment aligns the image relative to the other fields shown by the post (“none” positions it right above the title – often good when the post will be narrower, such as in a column, and there’s not room to wrap post text around a left/right aligned image).
- Columns automatically splits up the posts into the specified number of columns (on wider screens at least).
- Show divider after rows works well when posts will show one above the other and you want an extra visual divider between them.