Better Recent Comments vs Content Blocks (Custom Post Widget)

The default Recent Comments widget is somewhat limited. Better Recent Comments improves on this by providing a more flexible widget with options to show the user’s actual comment, as well as show avatars and the ability to show or hide the comment date. As well as the widget, there’s a handy shortcode you can use to display your recent comments. This is useful if you need to display comments somewhere other than your sidebar or footer, such as on your homepage. Simply add the shortcode [better_recent_comments]. That’s not all! The plugin is also WPML compatible, which means that the comments will be restricted to those in the current language. The default WordPress widget will list all recent comments, regardless of language, so you might end up with comments for German-language posts in the sidebar of your English site. Better Recent Comments solves this and makes sure the comments are for the current language only. Translations currently provided in Spanish, French and Italian. View the full plugin documentation in our Knowledge Base. Options available with the shortcode: format – the format of each recent comment. This option uses ‘placeholders’ which are substituted with the actual data when the comments are displayed. See the FAQs for details. number – the number of comments to display. Default: 5 comments date_format – the date and time format to use. Like WordPress, this uses a PHP date format. It defaults to ‘M j, H:i’. See this cheat sheet for a full list of date and time options. avatar_size – the size of the avatar in pixels. Only used if you have included {avatar} in your comment format (see ‘format’ option). Default: 50 post_status – the status of posts to retrieve comments for. Defaults to ‘publish’. Can be a single status or a comma-separated list, or ‘any’ to show comments for all post statuses. post_type – the post type to retrieve comments for. Accepts a single or multiple post types (e.g. ‘post’ or ‘post, dlp_document’) or ‘any’ to show comments for all post types. Default: ‘any’ excerpts – set to ‘true’ to show an excerpt of the comment (limited to 20 words), or ‘false’ to show the full comment. Default: true replies – set to ‘true’ to also show responses to comments, or ‘false’ to only see the top level comments. Default: true

The Content Blocks allows you to display the contents of a specific custom post in a widget on in the content area using a shortcode. Even though you could use the text widget that comes with the default WordPress install, this plugin has some major benefits: The Content Blocks plugin enables users to use the WYSIWYG editor for editing the content and adding images. If you are using the standard WordPress text widgets to display content on various areas of your template, this content can only be edited by users with administrator access. If you would like non-administrator accounts to modify the widget content, you can use this plugin to provide them access to the custom posts that provide the content for the widget areas. You can even use the featured image functionality to display them in a widget. The Content Blocks plugin is compatible with the WPML Multi-Language plugin and automatically shows the correct language in the widget area. The Content Blocks can be included in posts and pages using the built-in shortcode functionality. This plugin creates a ‘content_block’ custom post type. You can choose to either display the title on the page or use it to describe the contents and widget position of the content block. Note that these content blocks can only be displayed in the context of the page. I have added ‘public’ => false to the custom post type which means that it is not accessible outside the page context. To add content to a widget, drag it to the required position in the sidebar and select the title of the custom post in the widget configuration. Includes the following translations: Swedish (sv_SE) by Andreas Larsson Spanish (es_ES) by IBIDEM GROUP Portuguese (pt_BR) by Ronaldo Chevalier Polish (pl_PL) by Kuba Skublicki Dutch (nl_NL) by Johan van der Wijk Czech (cs_CZ) by Martin Kucera More translations are very welcome!