1. Upload `get-recent-comments.php` to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory.
2. Activate `Get Recent Comments` through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress.
3. What to do now depends on how up to date your theme is:
**Modern theme with widget support**
The plugin is a [widget](http://automattic.com/code/widgets/). If your
theme supports widgets, and you have installed the [widget
plugin](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widgets/), adding the plugin to the
sidebar is easy: Go to the presentation menu and drag and drop the widget into
the sidebar ([Screenshot](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/get-recent-comments/screenshots/)). Don't forget the Get Recent Trackbacks box. And you might want to
change the title. All done.
**Old school theme without widget support**
You need to insert the following code snippet into the sidebar template.
*wp-content/themes/<name of theme>/sidebar.php*
<?php if (function_exists('get_recent_comments')) { ?>
<li><h2><?php _e('Recent Comments:'); ?></h2>
<ul>
<?php get_recent_comments(); ?>
</ul>
</li>
<?php } ?>
<?php if (function_exists('get_recent_trackbacks')) { ?>
<li><h2><?php _e('Recent Trackbacks:'); ?></h2>
<ul>
<?php get_recent_trackbacks(); ?>
</ul>
</li>
<?php } ?>
== Contributors/Changelog ==
Many users of the plugin gave feedback and contributed their ideas. They are
referenced in the [changelog](http://blog.jodies.de/archiv/2004/11/13/recent-comments/2/#changelog):
Version Date Changes
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
