Sometimes you would like to have a way to show the latest posts with Elementor free, or at least 3 or more articles of our chosen categories and maybe have a column layout in order to evenly fill a web page. The free version of Elementor lacks the widget to show posts but don't despair, because if you read this post carefully you can create your widget in 5 minutes if not less. This post makes sense if you don't want to install one of Elementor's many free Addons because you just need a quick way to show your latest posts selectively and you don't want to burden the site with so many plugins that make it slower. You must know that sometimes, the addons suites for Elementor, have a lot of files in both CSS and JavaScript that load into the pages even if you don't use them. This could be a problem if you want to keep the site in a "performing" way. What is needed to have the latest posts with Elementor free Apart from Elementor free we will use a very simple and very light plugin that in my opinion you should always have in all your WordPress installations because it is very useful. The plugin I'm talking about is called "Shortcode Ultimate" and you can find it easily from the WordPress plugin installer or simply by visiting its page in the WordPress Repository at this URL Create or edit the page Well now that you have it installed you can open the page or post where you want to create a list of posts that automatically updates whenever you publish new posts. Choose Elementor as editor for the post or page and create the columns as in the image below. Type in the search bar the word shortcode so as to find the widget to insert this shortcode: [su_label]〔su_posts posts_per_page = "3" tax_term = "6" order = "desc"〕[/su_label]* Now drag the shortcode widget into the first column and paste the code into it. Note that the trait tax_term = "6" indicates the ID number of the category of your choice. You can put a different category for each column. As for how many posts to show you can change the number in posts_per_page = "3" into as many as you like. Repeat the same for the other columns. Well, all done, you just have to put the same shortcode in all three columns and just change the category number to show the ones of your choice. How to see the category ID number This is a very simple task. Just go to the list of categories and point the mouse in the "edit" link (as in the image), now look below in the browser bar and you will see the ID code for that category. PS: Unfortunately it is not possible to also create a paging system that allows the user to go back and forth in posts on multiple pages. This function is not provided (or at least not yet at the time of writing). You can see many other variations of the simple shortcode on the ultimate shortcode site at this web address: https://getshortcodes.com/docs/posts/ Well, all right, now publish the post and you are done. Interest in elementor? Have a look at this other posts as well then *Replace the brackets with normal ones []. I had to use symbols instead of brackets in this article as otherwise WordPress try to interpret what the shortcode is about and display some posts on my article
