“Advanced Most Recent Posts” Wordpress Plugin

Advanced Most Recent Posts has to be one of the best recent article plugins I have tried & although not perfect, it really is in a class above many of the other recent article plugins.

Produced by Yakup GÖVLER: Advanced Most Recent Posts plugin is a fully featured plugin for dealing with and displaying your most recent articles on your Wordpress blog, it can display your most recent posts from a specific category, all categories or current category. All posts can also be displayed using thumbnail images (optional), the size of which can be selected in the admin panel.

Advanced Recent Posts Admin Panel

Plugin Admin  Accessed Via Wordpress Widgets

Another nice feature is the ability NOT to display the first article in any given category, this is of particular importance as the first article in any category is usually already displayed on the blogs home page. Although this feature was not built into the version I tested (v1.1), the author did make the code available to everyone from his website & it was a simple matter of inserting one line of code to replace another.

The settings as you can see in the image to the right, are fairly straight forward & self explanatory and are accessed from the widget control panel in Wordpress.

Exclude Categories:

One feature I would like to see built into this plugin, is the ability to exclude certain categories. This can be achieved at present, by simply listing the categories you want to list articles from, however if there are 9 categories you wish to work with & only 1 that you wish to exclude, then it is a little tedious listing all 9 categories in the current version.

Obviously it would be much easier if there was an option to select all categories & then just exclude the ones you do not want.

Missing img alt text:

As I said earlier this plugin was near to perfect for me, the only thing I found that let it down was the fact that if you choose to display images as I have done on my site, then the plugin did not add alt text to the thumbnails. Ok not a major problem I know & to someone fluent in php it would only take a few minutes to rectify, however when it comes to php I would class myself as a “blind butcher” I hack away in total darkness, not really knowing what I’m doing, sometimes I get lucky ! But most of the time I do not ! On this occasion I did manage to sort it out & now have the title of the articles as the img alt text, that’s a big plus for my SEO efforts.

I have no doubt that Yakup will make great improvements to his plugin, as different users come up with different ideas for inclusion in later releases. For now though I would rate this plugin as 8 /10 and well worth a little time spent checking it out!

Steve Nickson | Create Your Badge