One question I hear a lot is “can you add a second blog to a WordPress site?” The short answer is no. Well, not exactly. But there’s a pretty easy way to accomplish what you’re trying to do using a Query Loop block. A lot of WordPress beginners are intimidated by the Query Loop, but it’s actually pretty simple to use.
In layman’s terms, a query loop searches your site, pulls up content that meets certain criteria, and displays it accordingly. This means that you can make your page or pages show only the posts you want. Here’s how:
- Decide how you want to organize your blog pages. Are you trying to make a page for each author or each kind of content? You will be able to limit a query loop by authors, categories, tags, or keywords.
- Continue to post on your designated blogs page as usual. For each entry, make sure you add the information for category, tags, keyword, or author.
- Create a page for the new blog and design it as you normally would. If your site is for a business, make sure your design is compatible with your brand while standing out from your other blog.
- Add a new block to the page and choose Query Loop as the block type. Once the query loop options come up, click Choose.
- In the toolbar above the block, you can choose whether to display your blog as a list or grid, how many posts to show per page, and whether you want to offset your posts.
[Note: Offsetting means that the most recent post will not be displayed in this query loop. This is something you would do if you have another block designated for your most recent posts (for example, if you wanted the most recent post to display at the top of the page with different settings). In this case, you would choose offset by 1. Whatever number you type here is the number of posts that will be skipped before displaying the most recent posts in this block.] - Go to the block settings on the right side of the page.
A. Depending on your template settings, you might have have to toggle off the switch that reads Inherit Query from Template in order to make the other options available.
B. Choose Post from the Post Type drop down menu (you can also use query loops for pages and projects, but that doesn’t apply here).
C. Choose your post order. You can choose newest to oldest to display content like a regular blog or oldest to newest if you’re posting serialized content. Your other choices here are alphabetical and reverse alphabetical.
D. Choose whether you want to include sticky posts.
E. Under filters, you can decide what posts your query loop will display. Essentially, the query loop is retrieving posts based on the parameters you set here. You can choose categories, tags, authors, or keywords. Choose one of these filters and then type in the words the query loop should search for and bring back to this page. As soon as you have chosen to display only blog posts by a certain author, for example, this page will be updated to show only the posts by that author. When you add new posts on your main blog page, they will automatically appear on this page as long as they fit the specifications you’ve made in this filter section.
F. Use navigation menus to direct site users to this content. The page you have designated as your “blog page” will still have all your posts; adding them to this page doesn’t subtract them from that one. You will want to add your new page to one of your site menus so people can find it. Additionally, if you want another page that shows the posts except the ones you have included here, you will want to repeat this process.
While this method doesn’t technically add a second blog to your site, it accomplishes the same thing, and it’s fairly simple to set up and maintain.
Substance and Style 