Note from the moderator: Thank you for sharing the snippet with the Drupal community. As it is now the snippet might present security risks. See Writing secure code for a background on the most common mistakes.

Specifically, the snippet

• does not check output, potentially allowing Cross Site Scripting attackso (XSS, see How to handle text in a secure fashion for more information).

You may be interested in the functions node_view and/or check_markup.

The following code will generate a list of nodes, using the titles as links and showing a custom-length teaser (can be either shorter or longer than the drupal default).

/* Variables here include:
// $list_length:
//  the amount of nodes shown on one page
// $tid:
//  the number of the taxonomy category you want to display the nodes of
// $teaser_length:
//  the _minimum_ length of the teaser. Specify a number for a custom teaser length.
*/

  $list_length = 5;
  $tid = 11;
  $teaser_length = 150;

  $query = "SELECT n.nid" .
           " FROM {node} AS n" .
           " LEFT JOIN {term_node} AS tn ON n.nid = tn.nid" .
           " WHERE n.status = 1" .
           " AND tn.tid = $tid" .
           " ORDER BY n.nid DESC";

  $result = pager_query($query, $list_length);

  $output = "<div id='node-list'><ul>";
  while ($item = db_fetch_object($result)) {
    $node = node_load($item->nid);
    $output .= '<li><h4>' . l($node->title, "node/" . $node->nid) .
      '</h4><p>' . node_teaser($node->teaser, $teaser_length) . '</p></li>';
  }
  $output .= "</ul></div>";
  print $output;
  print theme('pager', $list_length, 0, 0);

an alternate method is:

/* Variables here include:
// $list_length:
//  the amount of nodes shown on one page
// $tid:
//  the number of the taxonomy category you want to display the nodes of
// $teaser_length:
//  the _minimum_ length of the teaser. Specify a number for a custom teaser length.
*/

  $list_length = 5;
  $tid = "1";
  $teaser_length = 150;

  $query = "SELECT tn.tid, n.nid" .
          " FROM {node} AS n" .
          " LEFT JOIN {term_node} AS tn ON n.nid = tn.nid" .
          " WHERE n.status = 1" .
          " AND tn.tid IN ($tid)" .
          " ORDER BY n.nid DESC";

  $result = pager_query($query, $list_length);

  $output = "<div id='node-list'><ul>";
  while ($item = db_fetch_object($result)) {
    $aNode['nid'] = $item->nid;
    $node = node_load($aNode);
    $output .= '<li><h4>' . l($node->title, "node/" . $node->nid) .
      '</h4><p>' . node_teaser($node->teaser, $teaser_length) . '</p></li>';
  }
  $output .= "</ul></div>";
  if (db_num_rows($result) < $list_length)
    $list_length = db_num_rows($result);

  print $output;
  print theme('pager', $list_length);