Not Geeky!

If you want to customize your Recent Post listing, one of the most popular Plug ins, is the c2c_get_recent_posts php function. However, of all the plug-ins that I’ve tried so far this is definitely not easiest one to use, that is if you use it with WordPress 2.7. (To be a bit more specific: I want to be able to show the 5 most recent posts (not pages) , with a date (format mmm-yy) and some text of the post)

I first started making the stupid mistake of forgetting to use some kind of plug-in to execute code in text widgets. So, when I had figured this out I installed Exec-PHP which made big improvement. (Why is this not a standard WordPress feature?)

However, the next problem was it was showing Pages as Posts so to speak.  Documentation says there should be an option to filter out the pages. However, this doesn’t seem to work with 2.7. So I tried to filter by specifying the Category. Then I found that you needed the category ID, which isn’t showing on any of the admin pages. However editing the Category of your choice gives it away: the url shows the Category ID and if that’s not good enough there always is another plug-in. Unfortunately this functionality is also broken with WordPress 2.7.

Last but not least I wanted to display the beginning of a post, say the first 5 to 10 words of the text. According to the documentation you’re supposed to use the excerpt function. Unfortunately it’s showing here the same text (of the first posting) with each post.

What does seem to work though is filtering by user. Once you’ve figured out which user has which ID you have at least some kind of filtering. I do hope a fix will be released soon. Scott, are you there? Please? Pretty, pretty please?

Hopefully I can give you an update soon…

[Update]
Shame on me!
Today I looked into the problem again. All of a sudden I discovered that I was using version 1.1. My admin panel told me there was a 1.5 available. I downloaded it. However things only got worse. I couldn’t see any postings anymore. Then I discovered that Scott had already released a version 3.0. But this version is NOT shown if you make use of the standard Plugin browser, you have to go to Scotts homepage!!

SO MAKE SURE YOU INSTALL VERSION 3.0! (if you’re using WP 2.7)

[Update 2]
Now, just one more thing: Date format in another language (Dutch). I’ve heard of the setlocale function but I can’t get it to work….

Yes this works really well, thanks Barry!

Also have a look here. For complete Dutchification…

Cheers,

Edwin