Emphasize latest post on the list

Did you ever wanted to distinguish your newest post in front of the other posts in the list ? This snippet will allow you to make your latest post look different (in any category) and to dinstinct itself from the rest.

1. Filtering

First we need to add additional css classes for our latest post. We can do this by adding this short function in the function.php file of the child theme:

add_filter( 'post_class', 'latest_post_class' );
function latest_post_class( $classes ) {
    global $wp_query;
    if( 0 == $wp_query->current_post )
        $classes[] = 'latest';
        return $classes;
}

We now have new .latest class that we can use to style our latest post.

 2. Styling

The following code should be copied into the custom css section or in style.css of your child theme. For this example, we will make our latest post to distinguish  itself with few elements in crimson color:

.latest h2.entry-title.format-icon {
color: crimson;
}

.latest h2.entry-title a {
color: crimson;
text-shadow: -1px -1px white, 1px 1px #333; 
}

.latest .entry-summary {
background-color: #FCE8EC;
}

Of course, all custom css styling can be applied, for all entry elements, like entry-title, entry-summary and entry-meta, e.g. tag and category links.