Displaying Latest Posts on a Page

You can modify your post template (usually index.php, but depends on your theme) to:

1. check if the current request should response those posts
2. add a segment which will query the database to retrieve the posts you wish
3. echo the post title and excerpt as you wish

The following code will query the database and return a string with the 5 latest posts with excerpts. Note the $before, $after, $before_excerpt, $after_excerpt, these are just wrappers for the content to make it look nicer, you can send all these as a parameter to the function, but for the sake of simpleness, I hard-coded these.

function get_posts()
{
    global $wpdb;

    $post_count = 5;
    $before="<h3>";              // this will be rendered before the post content
    $after="<br />";             // this will be rendered after the post content
    $before_excerpt="</h3><p>";  // this will be rendered before the post excerpt
    $after_excerpt="</p>";       // this will be rendered after the post excerpt

    $request =
    "
        select  ID,
                post_date,
                post_title,
                post_excerpt
        from    $wpdb->posts               p inner join
                $wpdb->term_relationships  r on r.object_id = p.ID inner join
                $wpdb->terms               t on t.term_id = r.term_taxonomy_id
        where   post_status="publish" 
                AND
                post_password = '' 
                AND
                post_type="post" 
        GROUP BY 
                ID,
                post_date,
                post_title,
                post_excerpt
        ORDER BY
                post_date DESC
        LIMIT   0, $post_count
    ";

    $posts = $wpdb->get_results($request);
    $output="";

    if ($posts)
    {
        foreach ($posts as $post)
        {
            $post_title = $post->post_title;
            $permalink = get_permalink($post->ID);

            $output .= $before;
            $output .= '<a href="' . esc_url($permalink) . '" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link: ' . esc_attr($post_title) . '">' . esc_html($post_title) . '</a>';

            $post_excerpt = esc_html($post->post_excerpt);
            $output .= $before_excerpt . $post_excerpt . $after_excerpt;

            $output .= $after;
        }
    }

    return $output;
}