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How to Control Which Posts Appear in ColorMag's Featured Widgets and Sliders

45 threads Sep 11, 2025 Theme → Colormag

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Many ColorMag theme users want precise control over the content displayed in their homepage widgets, such as TG: Featured Posts or the Featured Category Slider. A common challenge is that these widgets often pull content in a specific, predefined way that may not always match your desired layout. Based on community discussions, this article explains how these widgets work and outlines the most common solutions for gaining more control.

Understanding How ColorMag Widgets Work

The TG widgets included with the free ColorMag theme are designed primarily for use with standard WordPress posts and categories. Analysis of support threads reveals several key behaviors:

  • Post Type Limitations: Widgets like TG: Featured Posts (Style 1/2), TG: Highlighted Posts, and the TG: Featured Category Slider are built to display standard WordPress posts. They do not natively support custom post types (e.g., a 'show' post type) or pages.
  • Category Selection: When configuring a widget to show posts from a category, it will only display items assigned to that specific category. If you have a parent category, posts assigned only to its child categories will not be included.
  • Sorting and Filtering: The free version offers limited sorting options. Posts are typically displayed by date. Sorting alphabetically by title or by other custom fields is not available in the standard widget settings.
  • Display Limits: The number of posts shown in category archives or by widgets is often controlled by your global WordPress reading settings (Settings > Reading > Blog pages show at most).

Common Problems and Their Solutions

1. Problem: Needing to show posts from a parent category AND its child categories.

Why it happens: The widget's query is set to look for posts tagged with one specific category ID; it does not automatically traverse category hierarchies.

Solution: This requires a programmatic change to the theme's query. The most sustainable way to do this is by creating a child theme and modifying the function that generates the widget's output to include posts from child categories. This is an advanced solution that requires coding knowledge.

2. Problem: Wanting to display custom post types or pages in widgets.

Why it happens: The theme's widgets are hard-coded to query the standard 'post' post type.

Solution: Similar to the above, modifying the widget to support custom post types involves altering its underlying code within a child theme. This is not a simple settings change and requires development work.

3. Problem: Needing to sort posts alphabetically instead of by date.

Why it happens: The sorting order is fixed in the widget's code to prioritize recent posts.

Solution: Official support responses indicate this specific functionality is not available in the free version. Achieving this would, again, require custom coding in a child theme to change the 'orderby' parameter in the widget's query from 'date' to 'title'.

4. Problem: Controlling the number of posts displayed.

Solution: For archive pages (like category or author pages), navigate to Settings > Reading in your WordPress dashboard and change the "Blog pages show at most" value. For the widgets themselves, look for the "Number of posts to display" option within each widget's settings in the Customizer.

Conclusion and Best Practices

The free ColorMag theme provides powerful widgets for creating a magazine-style layout, but their core functionality is focused on standard posts and categories. For significant deviations from this default behavior—such as including child categories, custom post types, or custom sorting—custom code is necessary.

The recommended method for making these code changes is always through a child theme. This ensures your modifications are not overwritten when the main ColorMag theme receives an update. For users who are not comfortable with coding, exploring alternative plugins that offer more flexible query and display options might be a practical path forward.

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