Franz Josef Kaiser

Ralf Albert

AvatarPlus allows users to use the avatar from a social service of their choice (supports: Google+, Twitter and Facebook) as their comments avatar instead of the default from the Gravatar service or your WordPress installation. More and more users avoid typing in their mail address and instead just want to hand out their social profile URL. AvatarPlus adds this feature to WordPress comments, thus making the mail address field not required anymore for displaying an avatar image.
Flexibility for a maximum number of use cases: The plugin allows to either add a new field to the comments section or just use the homepage URL field for the social profile URL. AvatarPlus also recognizes redirects and is able to work with most URL-shortening services like bit.ly or goo.gl.
Environment friendly: AvatarPlus cares about your resources and uses a simple caching mechanism to save the avatar links directly and therefore reducing the number of HTTP requests to a minimum and serving your sites comments section as fast as possible.
Maximum code quality: Every single line of code is written with WordPress “Best Practice” in mind to serve you only the highest quality product.
<h3>Arbitrary section</h3>
AvatarPlus uses a simple caching mechanism. In some countries, webmaster have to declare if the webpage stores personal data about the user. AvatarPlus stores the following data:
<ul>
<li>The URL which the users entered into the comment form.</li>
<li>The profile URL to their social network profile, if the URL (which the user entered) redirects to their respective profile URL.</li>
<li>
The URL of the profile image they use on the social network.
</li>
<li>
This data will be stored until an expiration is set in the backend/administration interface.
</li>
<li>The expiration can divert (depending on your settings).</li>
<li>The check whether the plugin needs to delete. any data will be run once a day. For further details see the internal mechanisms of the plugin in its source code.</li>
</ul>

AvatarPlus

AvatarPlus allows users to use their profile image from Google+, Facebook or Twitter as avatar for their comment(s). AvatarPlus requires PHP v5.3+

Barn2 Plugins

Andy Keith

Kestrel

Amir Arabnezhad

The default Recent Comments widget is somewhat limited. Better Recent Comments improves on this by providing a more flexible widget with options to show the user’s actual comment, as well as show avatars and the ability to show or hide the comment date.
As well as the widget, there’s a handy shortcode you can use to display your recent comments. This is useful if you need to display comments somewhere other than your sidebar or footer, such as on your homepage. Simply add the shortcode <code>[better_recent_comments]</code>.
That’s not all! The plugin is also WPML compatible, which means that the comments will be restricted to those in the current language. The default WordPress widget will list all recent comments, regardless of language, so you might end up with comments for German-language posts in the sidebar of your English site. Better Recent Comments solves this and makes sure the comments are for the current language only.
Translations currently provided in Spanish, French and Italian.
View the full <a href="https://barn2.com/kb-categories/better-recent-comments-kb/" rel="nofollow ugc">plugin documentation</a> in our Knowledge Base.
Options available with the shortcode:
<ul>
<li><code>format</code> – the format of each recent comment. This option uses ‘placeholders’ which are substituted with the actual data when the comments are displayed. See the FAQs for details.</li>
<li><code>number</code> – the number of comments to display. Default: 5 comments</li>
<li><code>date_format</code> – the date and time format to use. Like WordPress, this uses a PHP date format. It defaults to ‘M j, H:i’. See <a href="https://barn2.com/PHP-Date-Format.pdf" rel="nofollow ugc">this cheat sheet</a> for a full list of date and time options.</li>
<li><code>avatar_size</code> – the size of the avatar in pixels. Only used if you have included {avatar} in your comment format (see ‘format’ option). Default: 50</li>
<li><code>post_status</code> – the status of posts to retrieve comments for. Defaults to ‘publish’. Can be a single status or a comma-separated list, or ‘any’ to show comments for all post statuses.</li>
<li><code>post_type</code> – the post type to retrieve comments for. Accepts a single or multiple post types (e.g. ‘post’ or ‘post, dlp_document’) or ‘any’ to show comments for all post types. Default: ‘any’</li>
<li><code>excerpts</code> – set to ‘true’ to show an excerpt of the comment (limited to 20 words), or ‘false’ to show the full comment. Default: true</li>
<li><code>replies</code> – set to ‘true’ to also show responses to comments, or ‘false’ to only see the top level comments. Default: true</li>
</ul>

Better Recent Comments

Great plugin, works flawlessly, and very easy to use. The comments now appear nicely on my site. My only wish is to be able to hide site owner / admin's comments. Thanks!

Excellent

I used the default Recent Comments plugin and was dismayed by how ugly and uninformative it was. It doesn't show the comments!

Better Recent Comments shows a nice avatar AND the actual comment.  Perfect.

Very happy with it

Although there are many ways to put a 'recent column' widget in your sidebar, this is the best. Easy to customize (read the docs for shortcode parameters), and insert a block that contains the shortcode with all of your desired options. Add a '<h3 class=widget-title>Recent Comments</h3>' just above the shortcode to put a heading.

Great stuff !

Great - Better than Writing Your Own

Provides an improved Recent Comments widget and a shortcode to display your recent comments on any post or page.

AvatarPlus vs Better Recent Comments