On the homepage I want to display the latest 4 posts from the ‘news’ and ‘events’ category, whereas on the events page, I just want to display all posts in the ‘events’ category in WP’s usual paginated form if there is a lot of them.
Do you know of any plugin that handles this kind of rules based post generation? If not, what would be the best way of going around this?
you should maybe think about using one of WordPress’ built in queries for this sort of thing and create yourself a couple of custom loops. There probably are plugins out there that can do this for you but as a general rule it’s better to reduce reliance on 3rd party scripts wherever possible.
To do what you have described above you’d probably need a loop that looks like this (Drop this into your homepage template):
To achieve your other loop you would want pretty much the same thing as above, however, you will need to change the first line a bit. Something like this should work (drop this into your custom page template):
More info on WP-Query can be found here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query
Hope this helps!
Take a look at List category posts plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/list-category-posts/