I’ve been using the beautiful Ryu theme by Takashi Irie on this site for a couple of years, but I’ve always wanted to have the homepage display more than just my latest posts. To address this, I’ve written a child theme for Ryu that allows you to select categories to feature on the homepage alongside an excerpt of the latest post.

This allows my site to simultaneously feature content from the disjoint topics that I write about, like woodworking, programming, and 3-D printing, regardless of whether they were the most recent posts I wrote.

If you want to use Ryuki, install Ryu and Ryuki, activate Ryuki, and then choose your featured categories in the “Featured Categories” section of the Customizer.

By default, Ryuki will just show links to your latest posts in the featured category sections. You can select up to three categories to use in those sections; Ryuki will choose the three most recent posts in each category. Posts will not be duplicated if they appeared in both categories.

Optionally, you’ll also want to set your front page to display a static page because Ryuki’s homepage template doesn’t include post navigation. Ryuki will take over the static page, so it can just be a blank page, and the page you choose to display your latest posts will act like your old Ryu homepage did.

Ryuki is open-source and available on GitHub.