Show more than one post in home.

Sorry, code should be:

I’m currently running wordpress 4.5 with a WooTheme called The Morning After. I decided to change a few things here and there, but encountered some issues regarding the posts_per_page argument used in the WP_query object. The intention is to show more than one post (3 or 4 posts) and ignore the category Featured articles.

$args = array('posts_per_page'   => 3,
              'category__not_in' => get_cat_ID('Featured articles'));

$query = new WP_query($args);

while ( $query->have_posts() ) { $query->the_post();

    echo '<li>' . get_the_title() . '</li>';

    break;
}
wp_reset_postdata();

What am I doing wrong? Result is just the latest non-Featured articles post.

It is funny that when I use the following code, the minimum number of posts in the result is 4. Even when the posts_per_page argument is set to 1, 2 or 3. When I change it to 5, the result is also 5 posts. The same counts for the above code when I remove the ‘break;’.

$args = array(
	'posts_per_page' => 5,
	'category__not_in' => get_cat_ID( 'Featured articles' ));

$the_query = new WP_Query( $args );

while ( $the_query->have_posts() ) : $the_query->the_post();

echo '<li>' . get_the_title() . '</li>';

endwhile;