AHP Recent Posts

Building on the venerable Recent Posts plugin by Ron and Andrea, I have created an extended version that offers a lot more user control over output, including gravatar support. The basic features are:

• excludes posts on main blog (blog ID = 1)
• excludes first posts (Hello, world) on user blogs (post ID = 1)
• option to show gravatar support (24px). Gravatar links to posts by user on their blog.
• option to show post excerpt. User can specify excerpt length with extra argument. Option to capitalize 1st five words of excerpt for readability.
• option to show post author name
• option to show post date
• option to show post comment count
• all dispay options can be selectively toggled on or off using a single bitmask parameter, permitting very flexible and customizable usage (256 possible configurations!)
• numerous other display and formatting options can be easily edited in source code using global vars

The argument list:

• $how_many: how many recent posts are being displayed
• $how_long: time frame to choose recent posts from (in days)
• $optmask: bitmask for various display options (default: 255)
• 1; // gravatar
• 2; // date
• 4; // author name
• 8; // comment count
• 16; // blog name
• 32; // post name
• 64; // post excerpt
• 128; // excerpt capitalization
• $exc_size: size of excerpt in words (default: 30)
• $begin_wrap: start html code (default:
• )
• $end_wrap: end html code to adapt to different themes (default:
)

To use the bitmask option, simply add the numeric codes for the display options you want together. For example, suppose you only want gravatar, post name, and date – then the bitmask would be 1+2+32 = 35. Using a bitmask in this way, you can turn on or off any combination of display options above, using only a single function argument.

Tags : wpmu, plugin, recent posts, widget