Forum: Radiant CMS Displaying Recent Articles

Does anyone know of an extension that will allow me to automatically 
display recent articles with a title and a small excerpt?

It's built in.

<r:find url="/news"><!-- or blog, articles, whatever -->
  <ul>
  <r:children:each order="asc" limit="20" >
    <li>
   <p><r:link /></p>
<p class="excerpt"><r:content part="excerpt" /></p>
    </li>
  </r:children:each>
  </ul>
</r:find>

This is off the top of my head so I'm not 100% sure that will work.  But
it's close.

Thanks Joel, I had no idea that was in there!

The code you sent me provides a list of links, is there anyway to format 
it so that it shows a small excerpt for each link, and keeps the site 
formatting styles (header1,2 etc.)?

Basically so it would look like this:

http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/3228/screenshot...

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated

You should probably look at some documentation.  For starters:

https://github.com/radiant/radiant/wiki/Radius-Tags
http://radiantcms.org/blog/archives/2006/05/11/tag-primer/

And my example was based on the assumption you had a page part for all 
your
articles/posts called "excerpt".  If you don't have one you'll either 
have
to add one or maybe use something like a text expander plugin of some 
sort
(example: http://plugins.learningjquery.com/expander/)

Good luck!

- Joel

Use a page part and call that if you want to choose the excerpt or you 
can
use truncate https://github.com/saturnflyer/radiant-truncate-extension 
to
take the first X characters from the article and, well, truncate them.

--
Rachel

Sweet, thanks Rachel, I'll definitely check out that extension.

So far I've gotten the following code to do what I want:

<r:find url="/articles">
<ul class="list2">
  <r:children:each order="asc" limit="20" >
    <li>
         <h3><r:title /></h3>
  <p class="excerpt"><r:content part="excerpt" /></p>
<p><a href="<r:url />">Read this article</a></p>
    </li>
  </r:children:each>
  </ul>
</r:find>

What would I need to add to this so that Radiant only pulls pages that 
have excerpts (to stop it pulling things like "contact us" pages or menu 
pages etc.?

Thanks!

Either make sure that only pages you want pulled in are under the url 
you're
pointing at (why is your contact us page under /articles ?) or look into
featured pages
https://github.com/saturnflyer/radiant-featured_pa... to 
select
particular pages for display only.

--
Rachel

I'm about to announce a re-release of featured_pages, but that's not
what you want here.
I'm not sure why you have a 'contact us' page under articles, but you
might have your reasons.

Using featured_pages would require a lot of manual labor.
What you want is for it to be automatic.

Just use the <r:if_url> or <r:unless_url> tags.

You can do something like this:

<r:find url="/articles">
 <ul class="list2">
 <r:children:each order="asc" limit="20" >
     <r:unless_url matches="^contact-us$">
    <li>

The wiki has a lot of great content
https://github.com/radiant/radiant/wiki/Conditional-Tags

Sweet, thanks guys for all your help!

I got lots to read up on now :)