Recent Posts: WordPress Plugin

1. Looks like an interesting plugin I will try out. One quick question right away, Would it be possible to modify the recent posts to only show posts older than X. This way it can prevent redundancy of showing the same article links on the frontpage of very recent articles.

   Cheers.

2. Gemme: I’ll look into it. Were you thinking of X days old, or of skipping X posts, or of specifying X as a date, etc. ?

3. Hi Rob, thanks for getting back.

   I think the “skipping X posts” would be the most useful, at least for me.

   I have 3 posts on the homepage plus some links, using another plugin to show recent posts per category in the sidebar.

   Setting your plugin to show a list at the bottom of the page and skipping all of these by defining x=11 for example, would be great.

   I did a quick test run with your plugin, placed the but afterreloading the page unfortunately got a message of having a db error. I’ll post the error here but just delete it from the comment if you feel it clutters the comments too much.

   thanks.

   —

   WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘) && post_author NOT IN ( ) ) ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT’ at line 1]
   SELECT DISTINCT ID, post_title, post_content FROM wp_posts LEFT JOIN wp_post2cat ON ID = post_id WHERE post_date

4. Gemme: I’m glad that’s the kind of skip X you are looking for because it is easy to implement!

   As for the error message … have you specified excluded_authors=”? If you have, for the moment, specify ‘9999’ instead–it should be a non-existent category–and I’ll make the fix in code. Let me know if the problem is not that.

5. Rob,

   I haven’t touched the code of the plugin itself so that is probably not the problem

   Could it be I place the code it in the wrong spot in the index.php ?

   Thanks again:)

6. Gemme: Thanks for bringing this to my attention. It was a problem setting default values when Similar Posts isn’t also installed. I hope I’ve fixed it now. Let me know.

   I’ve also added the ability to skip the top X posts as you asked.

7. Nice update Rob. It works now pretty perfect, especially the ‘Skip’.

   Thanks. I just have to figure out how to style the links + excerpts a bit better as they are all bullitpointed. Something for next week.

   Cheers,

   G.

8. Gemme: That’s all down to CSS … Good Luck!

9. Thanks for the plugin. Any idea on how to modify it so that an excerpt won’t end in mid-sentence? Basically it should take the amount of words that you want it to and then go backwards till it finds a period and strip all characters after the period. Is there easy php magic to do this?

10. I’m testing the plugin, and have the posts with their excerpts displaying just fine, but the pages won’t display. I’m using WordPress 2.0.5 without the Similar Posts plugin. Here’s the code I’m using:

    *?php recent_posts(‘none_text=nothing found&show_static=true&show_excerpt=true&excerpt_length=25&before_excerpt= – ‘) ?*

    (The * are replaced with brackets.)

    What do I need to change to get the pages to be included?

11. Star: I’ve just posted an updated version (1.02) that addresses the problem. Give it a try and let me know if it works for you.

    Thanks for reporting the bug.

12. John: I’m playing around with one or two ways to do that for you. Watch this space…

13. Thanks, Rob. My pages show up now. Moving it to “production” tonight.

14. I found this plugin useful for filtering my list of recent posts by category. One suggestion: it would be nice to have a way of specifying ‘nothing’ in the before_title, after_title options. If there is already a way to do this I may have missed it, but I got around it by setting the attribute to ‘-‘ then hacking the php to recognise this as a null character.

15. Ryan: I see the problem and I think I see a general solution. I’ll test it and post an update.

16. How can I get the date to show up before the post titile?

17. This is a great plugin. However I am using a photopress plugin which puts in tags like [photopress:alignment_1_2_blahblah] and this code shows up in the excerpts. I don’t want the photo to show up on the front page where I am using this plugin, but I don’t want this code either. Is there anyway to just strip out everything in brackets?

    thanks!!

    ~shiva

18. Hoboken: I’m working on a new version that will give much greater flexibility of what to display and how to display it. It involves some biggish changes so it might be a few days before I’m happy it is working properly.

    Shiva: I’ll think about your request… obviously it would be no good to strip everything in square brackets but I may he able to include an option.

19. Thanks Rob for your work on this. Much appreciated! An option would be great. If the plugin doesn’t render such things in brackets I am wondering why it would be needed.

20. I have a similar problem with the brackets, only it is with inserting videos. The tag looks like this: [youtube]Ge0kYHjXHL0[/youtube], so in this case one would want to get rid of not only the brackets but everything in between them. Sounds like it is getting complex!

    Also, does this plugin have to share options with similar posts? I use both and want different display options for each.

21. Shiva & David: You are right that it is getting complicated. I personally don’t use the excerpt functionality so I haven’t thought a lot about how best it should work. I took over from the Related Posts plugin the way it displays a simple snippet with HTML tags removed. My sense is that the excerpt is just to give a glimpse of the content rather than to render it fully … but am I wrong? There are some choices then: do we render the excerpt fully, tags and all; do we try and give options to strip out whatever kind of tags the user happens to use; or do we leave it alone? Any ideas?

    David: Sharing options? I built Similar Posts first and then realised I could extend it to the other plugins easily. It seemed silly at the time to duplicate all the option page code for each plugin. I thought users would probably have a basic set of options that would be shared among the various plugins and still be able to customise each one by specifying its parameters.

    I am wondering now whether or not to give each plugin its option page. The price would be duplication of code and of option screen real estate. The pay off would be ease of use.

    What do you (all) think?

22. I think the advantages of having seperate options pages outweights the disadvantages. It’s only one more tab on the options page and duplication of code is no big deal.

    Having the option of stripping out things in brackets would be ideal as so many other plugins use these. Something like the youtube tags mentioned above where it uses 2 sets of brackets might be too difficult?

    ~shiva

23. Shiva: I’m coming round to the idea of separate options pages. Lots of other things are underway too. I’ve found a way of stripping any kind of pseudo-tag. I could also give the possibility of letting the tags ‘do their stuff’ just as they would in the post itself. I’m also getting somewhere with a very flexible way of specifying whatever kind of output the user wants.

    My main problems now are implementing all that without too many bugs and working out how best to specify the burgeoning set of options!

24. A new version is now available.

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