Easily Link to your Latest WordPress Post

Custom PHP Link Tree with Dynamic Latest Post URL

As a web developer nerd, it was unthinkable to use a WordPress plugin to create a “link tree” for my socials. It was a fun project one night to write up an HTML page with custom CSS and drop it into the webserver. However, I quickly realized that I wanted a dynamic link to the latest post rather than updating it manually each time I published. I scoured the web for a quick solution and while I found many people who were also searching for the same thing, nothing was quite working for my use case. In this post, we will create a custom link tree in PHP at the root of the word press server which has a link to the latest post.

The PHP Code 🤖

It is important to make this file at the root. I tried putting it in a folder but the includes are finicky and it seems to work best operating at the root level.

<!--links.php-->
<?php 
     require('./wp-load.php');
     $args = array(
          'post_type' => 'post',
          'post_status' => 'publish'
     );

     $all_posts = get_posts($args);
     $title = $all_posts[0]->post_title;
     $link = $all_posts[0]->guid;
?>
<div>
     <a class= "myButton" href="<?=$link ?>" target="_blank">
          Latest Post: <?= $title?>
     </a>
</div>

The require statement¹ How to use WP Functions “outside of” WP: https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/47049/what-is-the-correct-way-to-use-wordpress-functions-outside-wordpress-files lets us use WordPress functions. The get_posts² Docks for get_post: https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/get_posts/ function is fetching the latest posts (I think by default, the first published 4) as an array of WP_Post objects. You can grab the post_title and the guid to use in an HTML link or however you please in the rest of the PHP file!

The Fun Part, CSS + HTML