First off, you may be interested in the “Front Page” plug-in that allows you create a static front to your blog. http://www.semiologic.com/software/static-front/
Second, yes, the loop can be changed. You’ll find this page very helpful: http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop_in_Action#Static_Front_Page
Third, you can have one post on one page and ten on another. There are several ways to do it, and I’m not sure which will be easiest for you, personally. In any case, you’ll need to set the number of posts displayed back to ten, and then alter the loop in the index.php file that came with your template.
The proper method is to use a query:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts
?php
get_header();
query_posts(‘posts_per_page=1’); //returns only the front page
?>
You’ll find this method well documented at:
http://ifelse.co.uk/archives/2005/04/10/make-wp-show-only-one-post-on-the-front-page/
The second, “quick and dirty” method is to put the one post you want on the front page in a seperate category (for example, “Front_Page”) then, filter out all other posts that aren’t in that category by adding this to your loop:
<?php if (in_category(‘2,3,4,5)) continue; ?>
… like this …
<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<!– If the post is in the category we want to exclude, we simply pass to the next post. –>
<?php if (in_category(‘2,3,4,5’)) continue; ?>
In this example, 2,3,4,5 are the categories being filtered out of your frontpage. You can find the category numbers by going to Manage > Categories When you want to change pages, just edit the entry and change the post’s category.
Alternatively… and I don’t know why you would do this … unless you couldn’t get a query to work and you didn’t want to change your posts’ category (for example, because of permalinks) … another method involves using a plugin, such as Tony’s Get Recent Post http://girasoli.org/?p=26. In that case you would remove your frontpage loop:
while (have_posts()) : the_post();
and replace it with < ?php _e(get_recent_post(0,0,0)); ?>
That would let you display you most recent post on the frontpage, but would be really inefficient compared to the other two methods.
Hope that helped:)
