Display recent post and CSS

RE: Display recent post, here’s another *built-in* option:

<?php
$latest = new WP_Query('showposts=1'); $latest->the_post();
?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>

“How would you output more than just the recent?“

Knew that question would come up. 🙂

You’ll need to incorporate The Loop for handling multiple posts called through the WP_Query class. The following will display the last 3 posts in an unordered list (incorporates id and class attributes you can use with css for styling, per your second query):

<ul id="latest">
<li><h2>Latest posts</h2>
<ul>
<?php
$latest = new WP_Query('showposts=3'); while($latest->have_posts()) : $latest->the_post();
?>
<li class="recent-post"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>
</li></ul>

For more, note the WP_Query class accepts the same arguments as query_posts():

http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts