Recent Posts

Caveat

Unfortunately, due to ill-health, this plugin has not been developed or supported properly for some years. It works with the latest versions of WordPress (including on this website) but could possibly conflict with any WordPress features added after 2008 — e.g. custom post types — if you use them.

Purpose

This plugin displays a list of the most recent posts to your blog in a highly customisable way.

This is version 2.6.2.0 download latest version. It is compatible with WordPress 1.5–2.6.2.

  • 2.6.2.0 supplies a .pot file making internationalisation possible; introduces the {imagealt} output tag and allows {excerpt} to output whole sentences; the content filter and the widget can now take a parameter string; output can be automatically placed after post content without editing theme files.
  • 2.6.1.0 allows the current post to be marked manually where the automatic mechanism fails; when used as a widget the plugin now honours the setting to show nothing when there is no output; and {commenterlink} now applies the appropriate WordPress filter.
  • 2.6.0.1 fixes the option to include attachments and adds a parameter to the {imagesrc} output tag to append a suffix to the image name.
  • 2.5.0.11 has a new option to include posts which are attachments; a new output template tag {authorurl} which points to the archive of the author’s posts; new behaviour for the {php} output tag which can now accept other output tags in the code.
  • 2.5.0.10 fixes several bugs.
  • 2.5.0.9 adds options to match the current post’s author and to select posts by date of last modification rather than date of creation. Also extends the options for snippet and excerpt output tags to make the ‘more’ text into a link.
  • 2.5.0.8 adds an option to show posts by status, i.e., published/private/draft/future, changes the {categorynames} and {categorylinks} output tags by applying the ‘single_cat_name’ filter, and fixes a bug in WordPress pre-2.2 that stopped installation code running on Windows servers.
  • 2.5.0 introduces a new output tag {imagesrc}, and adds more parameters to {image}. Fixes bugs with empty categories, excluded posts, and the option to omit current posts.
  • 2.5b25 makes some important changes: the {image} output tag now serves real thumbnails (couple of bug fixes too); output can now be sorted as you choose with sub-headings included; the {date:raw} tag modifier has been added to help the sorting; the ‘trim_before’ option has been replaced with the more logical ‘divider’.
  • 2.5b24 fixes to stop recursive replacement by content filter, {gravatar} to allow for ‘identicon’ etc., to {commenter} to allow trimming, and to remove a warning in safe mode
  • 2.5b23 brings a new option to filter on custom fields and adds proper nesting of braces in {if}.
  • 2.5b22 fixes bugs in several output tags, and introduces the option to show only pages.
  • 2.5b18 fixes filtering output and introduces the conditional tag, (if:condition:yes:no}.
  • 2.5b16 fixes a problem with {php}.
  • 2.5b15 more bug fixes and added ‘included posts’ setting.
  • 2.5b14 continuing bug fixes.
  • 2.5b11 has new features and improvements.
  • 2.3.6 restores the widgetiness I managed to remove in 2.3.5!
  • 2.3.5 has been rebuilt to save memory and can match the current post’s tags. It also fixes a bug with categories in WordPress < 2.3.
  • 2.3.4 now works as a widget. Also can include or exclude the current post from the output.
  • 2.3.3 beta adds the ability to include as well as exclude categories and authors and is able to find posts by tag.
  • 2.3.2 beta fixes a conflict between tags and categories.

The plugin has an options page which lets you change how the output is generated and displayed.

Installation Instructions

  1. If upgrading from a previous version, first deactivate the plugin via the Plugins page and delete the plugin folder from your server.
  2. Upload the plugin folder to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory. You will also need to install the Post-Plugin Library.
  3. Go to your admin Plugins page and activate Recent Posts.
  4. Put<!--?php recent_posts(); ?--> at the place in your theme files where you want the list of similar posts to appear. Lorelle on WordPress has a good guide to modifying themes for plugins. If you are using a widget-ready theme the plugin can be placed from the widget admin page.
  5. Use the admin Settings|Recent Posts page to set all the available options. Alternatively, the options can be overridden by passing a parameter to the recent_posts template tag.

Usage and Options

The configuration page will help you to set up the plugin to your satisfaction.

If you also install the latest version of Plugin Output Cache the output of this plugin will be automatically cached for efficiency.

Note: If you find that your list of recent posts comes out backwards it is probably because you have MySQL version 4.1.21. That version of MySQL has a bug when a SELECT statement has both DISTINCT and ORDER BY clauses. The latest versions of the plugin (2.5+) avoid this MySQL bug.

238 replies on “Recent Posts”

  1. I am redesigning my website so some pages are WordPress and the galleries are hosted on SmugMug. Is there a way to use this plugin on the Smugmug site and display the recent entries from the WordPress blog?

    Thanks.

  2. I used your plugin but post title won’t link to the actual post. they are like link but don’t go anywere and stay on the same page . When I looked at the source the herf is empty: href=””

    Also {url} comes up blank.
    Would you help me out to fix it. I have same problem on 3 different wordpress

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