Posts Populating on Pages

Hi folks,

I’ve inherited a website developed by someone else. He had more knowledge of WordPress than me, and set up several pages where posts automatically populate on them. I can’t figure out how this is done. All I know to do is create a post and make sure the proper category is selected. As long as the category is selected, it populates on the appropriate page. Looking at the code, however, I don’t see how he set the page up to do that.

To make matters worse, he used Visual Composer to format a lot of the page contents of the site, and that plugin is broken. It also hides the code, so I can’t see how it’s done. If anyone has a workaround for that, let me know. I can’t hand code anything beyond basic HTML tags, so I’m completely stuck updating the pages where he used VC to do everything. Trying to get it working, but I’m under the gun to get these updates done.

Anyway – the main thing I need to understand is how do you tell a page to populate posts from a certain category, the number of posts to display, and how to display them? I’ve found tutorials on adding categories as pages in the navigation menu, but that’s not what I need to do. Here are examples of static pages with posts automatically populated on my site:

https://hollywoodprayernetwork.org/prayer/monthly-prayer-newsletter/

https://hollywoodprayernetwork.org/prayer/prayer-requests/

How are these pages built? I can paste code if needed. Thanks.