Working on a WordPress site for a client, they wanted to display a few excerpts of recent Blog posts on their homepage.

We were using a custom template for a page that was set as the homepage, but we didn’t have a widget area for that News area. Here’s how to add one:

In Functions.php of your theme, you will see something like this:

Follow the structure of the other widget areas and create your own, and it will appear in the list of Widget Areas in the Appearance -> Widgets page. Simple as that!

Then, go into your Page.php file or the specific page template that you’re adding the widget to (mine was home-page.php) and where you want to add the widget area, just add (your version of) this code:

To add News excerpts (portions of a blog entry), you can use a plugin such as Recent Posts with Excerpts with any category (or all) of Blog entries.