Display 2 posts before the others (sorted by date) in a category

First, it looks like there’s some issues in your shortcode. You have display-posts listed many times in there. Stripping all of that out leads to the following shortcode:

[display-posts title="In this section" category_id ="7" include_date="true" date_format="d/m/Y" include_excerpt="true" excerpt_length="55" excerpt_more="(....)" excerpt_more_link="true" wrapper="div" wrapper_class="dp-categories" columns="3"]

Second, unfortunately there’s not a way to specify which posts appear first in a shortcode, unless you manually specify all the posts you want shown.

For your use case, I think it would be simplest to use two shortcodes:

1. Display your two posts (897, 208)
2. Display recent posts from that category EXCLUDING those two posts (so they aren’t repeated)

I also changed the columns to 2 since the first shortcode only has two posts in it. Leaving it as 3 columns would add a gap.

[display-posts title="In this section" id="897, 208" orderby="post__in" order="ASC" include_date="true" date_format="d/m/Y" include_excerpt="true" excerpt_length="55" excerpt_more="(....)" excerpt_more_link="true" wrapper="div" wrapper_class="dp-categories" columns="2"]

[display-posts exclude="897, 208" category_id ="7" include_date="true" date_format="d/m/Y" include_excerpt="true" excerpt_length="55" excerpt_more="(....)" excerpt_more_link="true" wrapper="div" wrapper_class="dp-categories" columns="2"]

Hello Bill and thank you very much for that very detailed answer!

I didn’t understand that we shouldn’t repeat “display-posts” everywhere… Thanks for the info!

Then, I came to the same conclusion as you (use 2 shortcodes) and I rethought my categories.

So I created a new sub-category (89) for the posts that were to appear first and that, as time went on, will be more than two.

I then excluded this category so that the posts would not appear twice.

[display-posts title = "Droits des contractuels" category_id = "89" include_date = "true" date_format = "d/m/Y" date_query_column="post_modified" include_excerpt = "true" excerpt_length = "55" excerpt_more = "(...)" excerpt_more_link = "true" wrapper = "div" wrapper_class = "dp-categories" columns="3"]

[display-posts title="Dans cette rubrique" category_id ="7" cat_not_in= "89" include_date="true" date_format="d/m/Y" include_excerpt="true" excerpt_length="55" excerpt_more="(...)" excerpt_more_link="true" wrapper="div" wrapper_class="dp-categories" columns="3"]