Recent Posts Plus

An advanced version of the WordPress Recent Posts widget allowing increased customization.

Features Include:

• Display post thumbnails, with customizable size.
• Display post excerpt, author, comment count, and more.
• Provides options to trim the number of characters in the title and excerpt.
• Override the post order to order by; date modified, title, post ID, random, comment count etc.
• Exclude or include specific posts, authors, tags, or categories.
• Also includes a simple template parser so you can override the default output making custom styling easy.

Documentation

See documentation at http://www.pjgalbraith.com/2011/08/recent-posts-plus/

1. Upload recent-posts-plus.php to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Add the widget to your sidebar in ‘Appearance/Widgets’ in WordPress

See documentation at http://www.pjgalbraith.com/2011/08/recent-posts-plus/ and existing questions and answers at http://www.pjgalbraith.com/2011/08/recent-posts-plus/#comments

Installation Instructions

1. Upload recent-posts-plus.php to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Add the widget to your sidebar in ‘Appearance/Widgets’ in WordPress

1. 

   Widget options screen

1.0.11

• Exclude sticky posts being included at the beginning of posts returned, but the sticky post will still be returned in the natural order of that list of posts returned

1.0.10

• Fixed excerpt ellipsis being added to the title incorrectly

1.0.9

• Added option to customize the ellipsis within the Widget Output Template using {ELLIPSIS}...{/ELLIPSIS} tag
• The output of more template tags is now available when using PHP within the Widget Output Template
• Other minor tweaks

1.0.8

• Fixed tags being broken by truncation
• Note: links are being stripped again but formatting should be same as v 1.0.4
• Widget admin javascript is only being added when needed
• Added code to prevent direct script access

1.0.7

• Added option to display post author’s avatar. Using {AUTHOR_AVATAR} tag
• Added ability to add raw PHP code to the widget output template option

1.0.6

• Link and paragraph tags no longer stripped from excerpt. Now matches output of v 1.0.4

1.0.5

• Added ability to display custom fields i.e. meta-data
• Added option to truncate title and excerpt by number of words instead of just chars
• Added custom excerpt trimming function to avoid issues caused by WordPress’ overly simplistic excerpt function
• Minor localization fixes
• Small reduction in DB queries

1.0.4

• Added ability to override the date format inline, so you can have multiple date formats
• Changed the default date format to “M j”

1.0.3

• Fixed issue with limiting excerpt chars

1.0.2

• Fixed issue with thumbnail size input field width in Google Chrome
• Fixed issue when adding a new widget instance, expert options wouldn’t toggle on
• Added licence
• Added readme
• Added screenshot

1.0.1

• Prevented htmlspecialchars from being encoded twice

1.0.0

• Initial release