Blog and posts
Blog layout
Customize → Blog → Blog layout.
- Inline — one post per row: the date in a narrow column, the title beside it. Nothing else is printed, on purpose; a row that carried a thumbnail and an excerpt would stop being a row. A year of posts reads on one screen. This is the default.
- Stack — each post gets its title with its thumbnail and its text underneath.
The same row the Inline layout uses is also what the homepage prints under your content when Show latest posts after homepage content is on. See Site identity.
Inline post date format
The date format for those one-line rows, on the blog and on the homepage. It is
j M, Y out of the box, which prints as 20 Jan, 2026 — short, so the date
holds a narrow column and every title starts at the same place. Any format
string PHP’s date() understands works. Leave it empty to fall back to the site
format from Settings → General.
This is the one place given a format of its own. The date on the post itself still reads in the long site format, which is where the long form is right.
The setting is hidden while Display post meta date is off, since there is then no date to format.
What the listing shows
Four checkboxes in Customize → Blog, all on by default:
- Display post meta date — off leaves the Inline layout as a list of bare titles, aligned where the titles already were.
- Display post categories?
- Display post thumbnail on blog — Stack layout only; the Inline row never had one.
- Display post text — Stack layout only.
Post text below them chooses what that text is: Excerpt (the default — your manual excerpt, or an automatic one) or Full content, the whole post under each title.
What a single post shows
Customize → Single post, all on by default:
- Display thumbnail on single post?
- Display post categories?
- Display post date?
- Display post tags?
These are separate settings from the listing’s, so a post can carry its date and its categories while the index stays a bare list of titles, or the other way round.
Comments
Customize → Single post → Display comments? is off by default: a quiet site starts without a comment thread, and discussion is opted into rather than switched off.
Turning it on does not force comments open. WordPress’s own Settings → Discussion options and the per-post discussion box still apply on top of it, so a post with comments closed stays closed either way.
Archives page
The whole-blog index has a page and a section of its own — see Archives.