Output 3 most recent posts in Wordpress

Question

I was wondering if anyone new how to show the 3 most recent posts in Wordpress? Any help would be much appreciated.

How about just the post's thumbnail outputting 3 times?

Answer 1

WordPress have an inbuilt function to get the recent posts.

wp_get_recent_posts( $args ) ;

$args is the arguments you need to pass. To get the three most recent published posts you can do it like :

$args = array('numberposts' => 3, 'post_status' => 'publish');
$recent_posts = wp_get_recent_posts( $args ) ;

print_r($recent_posts);

You can get more info on this link wp_get_recent_posts

Hope this helps you :)

Answer 2

You can use query_posts

For example, on the homepage, you would normally see the latest 10 posts. If you want to show only 3 posts (and don't care about pagination), you can use query_posts() like so:

query_posts( 'posts_per_page=3' );

Hope this help!