Sillybean

Recent Posts with Excerpts

This plugin is part of the WordPress plugin competition. Like it? Give it a rating!

A widget that lists your most recent posts with excerpts, optionally limited to a category. The number of posts and excerpts is configurable; for example, you could show five posts but include the excerpt for only the most recent. Supports the_excerpt Reloaded and Advanced Excerpt.

Download at wordpress.org »

Recent Posts with Excerpt widget control screenshotRecent Posts with Excerpts widget output

41 comments

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Comments

  1. Works great, thank you

    Posted by baron on July 26th, 2009 at 11:33 am

  2. Just wanted to say “thanks” for this widget! It works beautifully in conjunction with “Thumbnail for Excerpts” (though I’d love to see thumbnail support here too).

    One issue: for whatever reason, changes to the “more…” link text are not taking. They’re saving in the widget interface, but not displayed on screen.

    Posted by ElShaddai Edwards on July 26th, 2009 at 9:11 pm

  3. Wow, thanks for reporting that — really stupid error on my part. Fixed! Version 1.11 should show up in WordPress Extend in the next half hour or so.

    Posted by Stephanie on July 26th, 2009 at 9:31 pm

  4. Hey

    it’s me from wp forum

    have you notice my following reply

    or if you want me to post it here let me know

    Posted by xinfo on July 27th, 2009 at 10:20 am

  5. I had not checked the forum yet this morning. Replying there, thanks.

    Posted by Stephanie on July 27th, 2009 at 10:45 am

  6. wow.. great plugin.. thanks for sharing

    Posted by 8207h32 on July 28th, 2009 at 7:29 am

  7. Beautiful, elegant, perfect!

    Thank you.

    Posted by Rachel on August 1st, 2009 at 3:42 pm

  8. Thanks for the plugin! Changes to the more link does not work though. You said you fixed and uploaded it, however the new version is not there yet… Can you share the fix here? Thanks!

    Posted by Sevim on August 2nd, 2009 at 8:41 am

  9. Sorry about that! It’s there under “Other Versions” — 1.11 is the one you want. It’ll be the current one sometime in the next fifteen minutes.

    Posted by Stephanie on August 2nd, 2009 at 10:17 am

  10. Nice work – best I’ve come across so far with simplicity. I am using the recent posts as a way to show upcoming events. I’d love the events to appear by descending date rather than the as written ascending order. Any easy way I can hard code the change?

    Posted by ztruk on August 3rd, 2009 at 9:49 pm

  11. Sure! Change line 67 to:
    $q = ’showposts=’.$instance['numposts'].’&order=desc’;

    I’m not sure that will get the next upcoming events, though — it might get the ones farthest in the future. You might also have to play around with the date range options for query_posts.

    Posted by Stephanie on August 3rd, 2009 at 10:09 pm

  12. @ztruk: Not to take away from this plugin, but have you looked at the “Event Calendar” plugin? It adds event date/time custom fields to your posts and includes a widget for displaying those in “event order” rather than published date.

    Posted by ElShaddai Edwards on August 3rd, 2009 at 10:11 pm

  13. I should mention that I’ve just updated the widget to 2.0. It’s not that much of a feature upgrade, but apparently I was doing the version numbering wrong, so I’m just jumping way ahead to get around the problem. ztruk, your change occurs in the same place in the new version.

    The Event Calendar plugin hasn’t been updated to work with 2.8 yet. It also inserts its content via Javascript, which I find annoying and pointless. Sadly, I don’t know of a better alternative, although I’ve tried half a dozen event plugins in the last month or so.

    Posted by Stephanie on August 3rd, 2009 at 10:21 pm

  14. Actually, I looked into Events Calendar a few weeks back, but I wanted something that would display the event rather have to look for it. Don’t get me wrong, it has its good uses that I will probably take advantage of when they update its compatibility with 2.8.

    Stephanie, I’ll give your code a try and let you know how it goes. Thanks for the quick reply!

    Posted by ztruk on August 3rd, 2009 at 10:49 pm

  15. A request to consider: can we get CSS classes on each different section of the excerpt? E.g., I want to style the post title, but it’s a generic ‘a’ before the blockquote. But applying CSS to the title ‘a’ also effects the ‘more’ text, which I don’t want.

    Posted by ElShaddai Edwards on August 11th, 2009 at 11:01 am

  16. Good idea, yes!

    Posted by Stephanie on August 11th, 2009 at 11:03 am

  17. Thanks so much for adding the category selector – that’s very helpful. I’m wondering if you could also think about adding the ability to exclude a specific category? For example, I’m using a category to designate some posts as “events” — it would be nice to not show those in my recent posts/excerpts area of the home page.

    P.S. back on the events topic, I’ve found a plugin called “Events” by Arnan de Gans that works very well for simple event integration with a blogsite. And no Javascript as far as I can tell.

    Posted by ElShaddai Edwards on August 14th, 2009 at 6:50 am

  18. Is there a shortcode for this plugin? I was checking out some of the other plugins in the competition and am hoping that I could use this one via shortcode in the Section Widget plugin.

    Posted by ElShaddai Edwards on August 18th, 2009 at 5:16 am

  19. Both good ideas, thanks! I’ll put them on the list for the next version. (There is no shortcode right now.)

    Posted by Stephanie on August 18th, 2009 at 7:07 pm

  20. Love this plugin!

    Please add the ability to display pages also :)

    Posted by Stephan on August 22nd, 2009 at 6:05 am

  21. Stephan, will the Post and Page Excerpt widget do what you need?

    Posted by Stephanie on August 22nd, 2009 at 10:17 am

  22. Hi Stephanie,

    It certainly would if it had the ability to pull a random number of page excerpts that were limited to only sub pages of a page. Or instead had the ability to exclude pages.

    There does not seem to be a whole lot of page related plugins for wordpress which is certainly understandable since it’s all focused around posts to begin with.

    Posted by Stephan on August 24th, 2009 at 1:21 pm

  23. Stephanie,

    Is it possible to do this very thing in a static page instead of a widget? I’ve seen a ton of people looking for this option, but nothing is out there that I have found.

    I’ve found plugins that show a list of recent post links, but nothing that shows x number of excerpts like your widget plugin.

    Any consideration of this would be mucho appreciated!

    blessings,
    Eric

    Posted by Eric on August 26th, 2009 at 2:46 pm

  24. Right now it’s just a widget, but I’ll see about adding a shortcode and a template function in the next version.

    Posted by Stephanie on August 27th, 2009 at 8:10 pm

  25. LOVE your plugin. Am wondering how to shorten the excerpts though. Changed the default word count line in the PHP from 55 to 20 but it doesn’t show through. There is no option to change in the interface that I can see.

    Posted by Terri on September 8th, 2009 at 1:04 pm

  26. This is almost exactly what I was looking for. All I needed to add was an option to display the dates of the recent posts listed and it was perfect. Maybe something to add in to future versions?

    All-in-all though, brilliant. Thank you so much!

    Posted by Owen on September 9th, 2009 at 10:48 am

  27. @Terri – I tried that too but it didn’t work. This is what you are looking for http://www.lancelhoff.com/change-the-excerpt-length-wordpress/

    Posted by Owen on September 10th, 2009 at 5:09 am

  28. Terri and Owen: if you have the_excerpt Reloaded installed, you’ll get an option on the widget to change the word limit. Otherwise it uses the WP default (which Owen’s link shows you how to change).

    Owen, I’ll add the dates in the next version. Thanks for the suggestion!

    Posted by Stephanie on September 13th, 2009 at 1:26 pm

  29. Very nice widget!

    One request: when selecting the option to “Link widget title to blog home page”, I would like to be able to choose where it links to; if I selected the option to display certain categories, I’d like it to jump to that category page.

    Cheers!

    Posted by Matthew on September 14th, 2009 at 1:59 pm

  30. Good point, Matthew. I’ll add that in the next version.

    Posted by Stephanie on September 14th, 2009 at 2:04 pm

  31. @ Matthew: I am looking for something along these lines as well. I would like the title to link to one specific page that is not the home page regardless the post categories. Basically just the ability to set the link destination…

    Great work, I love this widget!

    Posted by Liam on September 15th, 2009 at 12:17 pm

  32. is there a way to exclude the most recent post?

    Posted by Theodore Allen on November 24th, 2009 at 6:50 am

  33. I realy like this plugin,
    but got kind of a question. Is it posible to reverse the post.
    On the project i am working on recently, its a website for friends of me who want to adopt a baby.
    I have 2 categories. also 2 separate widgets.
    One for blogging and one for the procedures they’ve had to take.
    And its the procedure part that has to be reversed.

    got any idea how to do this?

    thanx in advance.

    Posted by Digital Movement on December 16th, 2009 at 7:46 am

  34. Thanks for a great plugin. The thing I like the most is using my own stylesheet instead of loading an extra.

    I’ve found that links in the excerpt have the quotes (“) stripped from them making the code invalid. Links still work in FF, but haven’t tested it further yet.

    Thanks again for a great plugin.

    Posted by Kevan on December 23rd, 2009 at 11:42 am

  35. Please disregard my last post.

    The culprit wasn’t this plugin, but the “Thumbnails for Excerpts” plugin.

    The quotes (“) had already been stripped before this plugin got the excerpt.

    Thanks

    Posted by Kevan on December 23rd, 2009 at 1:40 pm

  36. This plugin is excellent! However, I have been validating my site with your widget running and you are missing </li&rt; tags for your lists. It is a simple fix but without it sites cannot validate.

    Posted by Ben on December 27th, 2009 at 10:17 am

  37. Hey, I love the plugin, its working great on the main blog page.

    I have one question, though.

    I am building a website (html and CSS, not a wordpress site), and I have a need to show off “featured posts” on the website.

    I’m not sure how to pull just the data from your widget and place it in a div on my site, and I’ve been searching, and looking through code to no avail.

    Do you know of any simple ways of doing this? My PHP isn’t very good, and I’m in a bind to get this working as soon as possible.

    Posted by Wallace on January 12th, 2010 at 1:35 am

  38. Catching up on replies in reverse:

    Wallace, there’s no good way to use a widget without the rest of the WP structure in place. I think you’d be better off looking for an RSS parser — SimplePie, if you want PHP, or you could find a javascript-based one — and using the site’s feed instead of the widget.

    Ben, thanks for catching that. I’ll fix it in the next version.

    DM, there is no fast and easy way to do that. I’ll play around with it and see if I can work it into a future release.

    Theodore, no, not right now.

    Posted by Stephanie on January 12th, 2010 at 6:59 pm

  39. I entered. “Recent_with_excerpt them blockquote” in my CCS with some properties. Unfortunately I do not get any change. You have any suggestions?
    Thanks

    Posted by Axelmet on January 22nd, 2010 at 2:56 am

  40. damn translator… I meant “.recent_with_excerpt li blockquote”

    Posted by Axelmet on January 22nd, 2010 at 2:59 am

  41. I solved by removing “Blockqote” in the PHP pages, but it would have been more elegant to change the CSS

    Posted by Axelmet on January 22nd, 2010 at 7:27 am

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