=== Get Recent Comments ===
Tags: comments, widget
Requires at least: 1.5
Tested up to: 2.8
Stable tag: trunk

Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar. 

== Description ==

This plugin shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your
sidebar. You have comprehensive control about their appearance. This ranges
from the number of comments, the length of the excerpts up to the html layout.
You can let the plugin order the comments by the corresponding post, or simply
order them by date. The plugin can (optionally) separate the
trackbacks/pingbacks from the comments. It can ignore comments to certain
categories, and it offers support for gravatars. It only gives extra work to
the database, when actually a new comment arrived. You can filter out
unwanted pingbacks, which originate from your own blog. And it is a widget.

You might want to have a look in the [changelog](http://blog.jodies.de/2004/11/recent-comments/2/#changelog).

*Feature List*

* Highly configurable via WordPress admin interface.
* Support for WordPress 1.5.x, 2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.2.x, 2.3.x, 2.5.x, 2.6.x, 2.7.x and 2.8
* Adjustable layout by macros.
* Handles trackbacks and comments in separate lists, or in one combined list.
* Widget support
* Caches the output
* Order comments by date, or by posting
* Support for [gravatars](http://www.gravatar.com/).
* Option to exclude comments to posts in certain categories
* Doesn’t show pingbacks originating from own blog

== Installation ==
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/2004/11/recent-comments/2/#changelog):


     Version Date       Changes
     2.0.6   2009/03/31 Suppress mb_strrpos warnings, when
                        haystack is empty. Thanks to ted
                        and Michael for reporting the
                        problem.
     2.0.5   2009/03/27 Make all mb_* functions optional.
                        If function does not exist - use
                        old version.
     2.0.4   2009/03/27 Check for existence of
                        mb_regex_replace and if it does not
                        exist (i.e. php version < 4.2.0)
                        use old wordwrap version
     2.0.3   2009/03/26 Fixed %BEG_OF_TITLE% bug. Thanks to
                        everybody who reported this problem
                        (a LOT of people)
                        Fixed broken %author_url_href
                        macro. Now it works again.
                        Fixed broken gravatar function -
                        needed to bring e-mail address to
                        lowercase before using md5 on it.
                        Applied Sven Anderson's patch which
                        replaces the most critical string
                        functions with multibyte character
                        aware php functions.
     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 new in WP 1.5). Thanks to
                        maza for the hint.
     0.9     2005/03/20 Introduced admin gui. Handle
                        trackbacks different than comments.
                        Replaced most regular expressions
                        with basic string operations.
                        Dedicated macro for posting time.
                        Requested by Zonekiller
     0.8     2005/02/04 Readjusted sequence of arguments to
                        the one described in the
                        documentation. Thanks to Thomas
     0.7     2005/02/03 Renamed plugin to
                        get-recent-comments, to make it
                        possible to use the subversion
                        system at www.wp-plugins.org
                        Allow to specify your own
                        formatting in the function call
     0.5     2005/01/02 Removed superfluous </p>
     0.4     2004/12/19 Use function arguments for
                        displaying HTML before and after
                        the comment
                        Make number of comments and number
                        of characters also function
                        arguments
     0.3     2004/12/08 Link to permalink of comment
                        Wrap very long strings
     0.2                Don’t show comments that are not
                        approved
     0.1     2004/11/03 Initial release

Thanks to all who sent bug reports and ideas for
improvements. Please send me a mail if I forgot you to
mention here.




== Screenshots ==
1. Activation of widget
2. Administration Interface