The most popular use of the Posts View Lookup Canvas is the Featured/Recent Post option, but that is not all this tool can do! This allows a canvas in your blog template pages to pull in your most recent posts, most popular, or the latest posts from a specific category.
This article will explain:
How to create a Posts View Lookup Canvas
How to use this canvas to display recent posts
How to use this canvas to display featured posts
How to change the order of the posts displayed on this canvas
Custom Post Types for Advanced Blog users
Creating a Posts View Lookup Canvas
To make a Posts View Lookup Canvas from scratch, first add placeholder content to a canvas so that it can pull in your WordPress blog content and design. Then, set the WordPress canvas type to Posts View Lookup.
Once you have done this, you can choose from one of the configurations below to set up what kind of content your Posts View Lookup canvas will populate with.
Create a Recent Posts Section
Leave the category and tag names blank to pull in the most recent posts.
Create a Featured Posts Section
You can feature blog content from any tag or category that you have assigned to your blog posts in WordPress. Just be sure you’ve created that tag or category in WordPress and assigned it to a blog post, then add that tag or category to your Posts View Lookup canvas in Showit.
Note: You can either choose a tag OR a category. Filling in both fields will not work.
Set Up Featured Category
Insert the desired category slug, found in WordPress into the category slug option.
Set Up a Tag Section
The same process is done for pulling posts into the canvas based on the tag.
Inputting the desired tag slug here.
Order Options
There are a handful of options that you can choose from when sorting your posts in a Posts View Lookup Canvas. Here are some of the most popular.
Comment Count
Create a canvas of your hottest content by editing the order of the canvas to pull posts with the most comments first! You can pull from all posts, or include a category slug to pull the posts from a specific category with the most comments! Set Order By to Comment Count.
Modified Date
Prefer recently edited posts to appear first in this canvas? Set Order By to Modified Date.
Displaying Custom Post Type Posts
Posts View Lookup canvases can be used to display posts from a custom post type.
Custom post types are an advanced feature of WordPress. Using this setting requires a precursory knowledge of custom post types in WordPress and is beyond the scope of our general support so you may need the assistance of a designer if using custom post types is desired.
Note: Custom Post Types are only available on an Advanced Blog plan.
Using a custom post type allows you to separate content from your general post list. A great example of this would be a custom post type of "podcast". Learn about using custom post types with Showit here.
Custom post types must be setup prior to implementing into a Posts View Lookup canvas. Then you can setup your canvas in Showit as shown in the below example of displays posts from a "podcast" post type.
Configure Posts View Lookup for Custom Post Types
Set your canvas type to WordPress > Posts View Lookup
Create your layout with the number of posts you wish to display at one time.
Adjust Post Type to Custom
Enter your custom Post Type Slug into the field (this is the slug that WordPress uses for the custom post type)
Layout your custom posts and separate them into Canvas Views
Filtering posts by a Custom Taxonomy
In addition to support for filtering by standard Category and Tax options, you can also filter the Custom Post Types by a Custom Taxonomy.
Add a Filter by clicking the +Filter option within the Posts View Lookup settings.
Select Filter By: Custom Taxonomy
Enter the Taxonomy Slug set in WordPress for the taxonomy
Choose if you would prefer to Include or Exclude the terms you are setting.
Enter the Term Slug(s) you would like to filter for. Separate values with a comma.
Note: Showit supports custom taxonomies within post filtering for Posts View Lookup.
⚠️ Showit does not currently support the display of custom taxonomies within post templates.
Example of Posts View Lookup Section
Once you have these settings in place and content in your new custom post type your content will filter into the canvas like so!
