Michael Heilemann suggested a different kind of “latest comments” to me, and I implemented them.
Brian’s Latest Comments shows the latest activity on the website, as seen on the right hand side.
It has been tested to work with WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0 with the default theme.
Installation
- Download brianslatestcomments.zip
- Unzip to your wp-content/plugins folder
- Activate from your plugin admin page
If you are upgrading from 1.1 to 1.2, please note that the new versions function arguments are a little different.
How to use
The plugin gives you a function called blc_latest_comment.
The simplest way of using it is to add this to your blog:
<ul class="latestactivity">
<?php blc_latest_comments(); ?>
</ul>
However, it does offer a bit of customizability.
The arguments the function accepts are these:
blc_latest_comments(number of posts, number of commenters per post, hide track/pingbacks, prefix, postfix, fade_old, range_in_days, newest_color, oldest_color)
- Number of posts
- The number of posts you want in the list. Default is 5.
- Number of commenters per post
- How many names you want to show under each post. Default is 6.
- Hide track/pingbacks
- Whether or not to hide pingbacks and trackbacks. Default is false.
- Prefix and postfix
- These are wrapped around each post and list of commenters. Default is <li> and </li>.</dd>
- Fade old
- Whether to use comment temperatures. Default is true.
- Range in days
- The number of days it takes for a comment to fade from the newest color to the oldest color. Default is 10 days.
- New color
- The color of a completely new post. The default is a dark gray.
- Old color
- The color of a post that is as old or older than the number of days given by the “range in days” argument. Default is light gray.
If you have Dunstan’s Time Since installed, the links will have the title=”" attribute set to a time since message.
If not, there is no title.
How to change the look
The way I achieve the look I have on my Activity on the right hand side, is by adding this CSS to wp-layout.css:
.latestactivity small
{
display: block;
margin: 0px;
margin-left: 10px;
font-size: 94%;
}
Bugs and limitations
For a current list of bugs and bug reporting, please go to the project page.
Support and discussion
Please use the project forums for support requests and discussion about the plugin.
I think that’s about it. Happy latest commenting.