How can I include a post in a theme?

Question

Sometimes it might be necessary to include frequently-changing content in a theme, but themes take some time to modify, it may also be necessary to let a non-technical user maintain some content that appears on more than one page. Is it possible (without heavily impacting performance) to include a post in a theme?

Answer 1

You can but I think it's far more easier for you theme to add a sidebar and then place a text-widget (or any other widget) inside there because that's far more flexible.

What you describe I did for some sites longer ago. You can just load the post and display it. I used query_posts() to get the post(s) and then have_posts(), query_posts(), the_content() and so on to display it within the template files (e.g. probably footer.php in your case).

Answer 2

You should definitely use a widget to achieve this functionality, rather than hardcoding a call to a particular post in your theme. There are plugins that extend the widget functionality and make it easy to control which pages the widgets appear on.

Answer 3

There are several ways to do that:

1. Include a page (that does not appear in the menu)
2. Include a post
3. Add an option page to the theme, this page will include the text field you need here.

Options 1,2 can be implemented using query_posts. Option 3 can be foind here