Get Recent Comments

Screenshots

This plugin shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your sidebar. You have comprehensive control about their appearance. This ranges from the number of comments, the length of the excerpts up to the html layout. You can let the plugin order the comments by the corresponding post, or simply order them by date. The plugin can (optionally) separate the trackbacks/pingbacks from the comments. It can ignore comments to certain categories, and it offers support for gravatars. It only gives extra work to the database, when actually a new comment arrived. You can filter out unwanted pingbacks, which originate from your own blog. And it is a widget. You might want to have a look in the changelog. Feature List Highly configurable via WordPress admin interface. Support for WordPress 1.5.x, 2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.2.x, 2.3.x, 2.5.x, 2.6.x, 2.7.x and 2.8 Adjustable layout by macros. Handles trackbacks and comments in separate lists, or in one combined list. Widget support Caches the output Order comments by date, or by posting Support for gravatars. Option to exclude comments to posts in certain categories Doesn’t show pingbacks originating from own blog Contributors/Changelog Many users of the plugin gave feedback and contributed their ideas. They are referenced in the changelog: Version Date Changes 2.0.6 2009/03/31 Suppress mb_strrpos warnings, when haystack is empty. Thanks to ted and Michael for reporting the problem. 2.0.5 2009/03/27 Make all mb_* functions optional. If function does not exist - use old version. 2.0.4 2009/03/27 Check for existence of mb_regex_replace and if it does not exist (i.e. php version < 4.2.0) use old wordwrap version 2.0.3 2009/03/26 Fixed %BEG_OF_TITLE% bug. Thanks to everybody who reported this problem (a LOT of people) Fixed broken %author_url_href macro. Now it works again. Fixed broken gravatar function - needed to bring e-mail address to lowercase before using md5 on it. Applied Sven Anderson's patch which replaces the most critical string functions with multibyte character aware php functions. 2.0.2 2007/09/25 Fix: Plugin was not compatible to WordPress 2.0.11 any more. Thank you to Stephan for reporting the bug. 2.0.1 2007/09/24 Added switch on the categories page, which reverses the selection. It is now possible to include or exclude categories. 2.0 2007/09/24 New code for fetching the data: 1. Instead of one expensive database query we now use two or more cheap queries. Thanks to mirra, who reported the problem. And again thank you to the people mentioned in changlog 1.4, where the cache was introduced for the same (performance-) problems on big blogs. 2. This also fixed a bug, which lead to too less than requested comments in lists, ordered by post. Thanks to Johanna and Frédéric for reporting and documenting this. Changed the css in the admin gui, to work around a display issue with Tiger Admin. Thank you, Andi, for finding this. Added %time_since macro, which displays the time since the comment was posted. Thanks to Imran and Keith for sugesting (something like) this (very long ago). Admin interface: Added switch fpr turning on and off smileys. Thank you, panos, for requesting this feature. Support for Custom Smileys Plugin. Thanks to Henry for suggesting this. Fix: Username was not displayed as "Anonymous", if commentor left no name. Thanks to Pixelation for reporting this. Added support for WordPress 2.3. It will drop the post2cat table. Changed plugin to new taxonomy scheme. A *great* thank you goes to Lakatos Zsolt, who provided a complete patch for get-recent-comments-1.5.6, which made it very easy for me to understand how 2.0-beta10 had to be changed. Thank you also to xelios, Ville and Kretzschmar who warned me, that WordPress 2.3 will break the old plugin code. 1.5.5 2007/03/26 Added support for malyfred's Polyglot Plugin. Requested by Torben. 1.5.4 2007/02/01 Use full pingback_author as %comment_author (instead of 'Unknown', if the pingback parser fails to recognize the pingback_author. Thanks again to Gant who found this in his blog. Added %author_url_href macros, which allows to generate inactive links, if the commentator did not leave an url. This was wished (in part long ago) by beej, carl, FilSchiesty and SwB. Added %profile_picture macro, which supports Hannah Gray's Profile Pics Plugin. Thank you for the idea and your help, Markus 1.5.3 2007/01/15 Refresh cache, when a comment is approved by moderator. Problem found by Gant. Thank you! 1.5.2 2007/01/05 Added option for excluding comments from blog authors. Suggested by This is Zimbabwe, Slim, marilyn's shampoo and Igor M. 1.5.1 2006/12/29 Store the cache base64 encoded. There seems to be a problem with the unserialization of multibyte characters. Thanks to priv, who reported the problem and suggested the encoding. After upgrading to this version you should trigger a regeneration of the cache by adding a comment somewhere. 1.5 2006/12/27 New pingback parser Stop losing html entities and tags in the post titles and comments by using wptexturize. Thanks to ejm (again!) and mobius for reporting the problem and making suggestions. Bugfix in widget code: Error, when trackbacks came before comments 1.4 2006/12/24 The plugin is a widget now. Thanks to herrmueller and Thomas de Klein for suggesting this feature. Cache the output in order to reduce the database impact of the plugin. Thanks to the following people for reporting the poor performance and making suggestions to solve the problem: Brandon Stone, King of Fools, Robert Basic and especially CountZero. Option to combine comments and trackbacks in one list (requested by Maniac and die produzentin) Allow to Group comments by their posting (requested by eyolf) Allow limit of comments per post (suggested by Thomas) Use WordPress 2.1 compatible database variables. Thanks to spencerp, for reporting and fixing. Bugfix: Wrong key used in gravatar hash (Thank you, Hamzeh N., for finding and fixing this). Updated the stylesheets to the look of wordpress 2.x. Added two macros: %comment_type and %post_counter. Use less option variables in db. Updated instructions page. Dropped support for WordPress 1.2 1.3.1 2006/12/11 Fixes for problems with wordpress running under windows. 1.3 2006/11/26 Fixes for problems with php5. 1.2 2005/09/15 Prevent pingbacks from own blog. Thanks to Matt for the idea and support! To use the feature, go to the trackbacks configuration and enter the address of your webserver. 1.0 2005/03/21 Also show comments to static pages. (They are new in WP 1.5). Thanks to maza for the hint. 0.9 2005/03/20 Introduced admin gui. Handle trackbacks different than comments. Replaced most regular expressions with basic string operations. Dedicated macro for posting time. Requested by Zonekiller 0.8 2005/02/04 Readjusted sequence of arguments to the one described in the documentation. Thanks to Thomas 0.7 2005/02/03 Renamed plugin to get-recent-comments, to make it possible to use the subversion system at www.wp-plugins.org Allow to specify your own formatting in the function call 0.5 2005/01/02 Removed superfluous </p> 0.4 2004/12/19 Use function arguments for displaying HTML before and after the comment Make number of comments and number of characters also function arguments 0.3 2004/12/08 Link to permalink of comment Wrap very long strings 0.2 Don’t show comments that are not approved 0.1 2004/11/03 Initial release Thanks to all who sent bug reports and ideas for improvements. Please send me a mail if I forgot you to mention here.