Better Recent Comments
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
Redirect Gravatar requests
When displaying a post or comment with avatars enabled, WordPress will always check for the existence of a Gravatar. (Note: even the default avatars ‘mystery person’ and ‘blank’ are in fact Gravatars served from gravatar.com.) WordPress does this by sending an MD5 hash of every displayed post or comment author’s email address to gravatar.com. Even with many plugins that introduce locally stored default or user avatars, this check still happens. On top of that, some themes or plugins force (Gr)avatars to load even if the display of avatars is disabled completely in WordPress’ settings. If for whatever reason you do not wish for Gravatar to receive these requests (which some people have voiced GDPR concerns about), this plugin is for you. The way it works is every time WordPress attempts to display an avatar, this plugin first checks if the image is about to be retrieved from gravatar.com. If it is, the URL is changed to the locally stored ‘mystery person’ image (included with this plugin). If the avatar has any other source, this plugin doesn’t interfere. Gravatars are also removed from the Discussion page in Settings and replaced with the locally stored ‘mystery person’ image. Again, any non-Gravatar images are left alone. Upon activation of this plugin, if a Gravatar is selected as the default avatar, that setting is changed to the locally stored ‘mystery person’ image. If any non-Gravatar avatar is selected, that setting isn’t changed. Upon deactivation of this plugin, if the locally stored ‘mystery person’ image is selected as the default avatar, that setting is changed to the Gravatar logo. If any non-Gravatar avatar is selected, that setting isn’t changed.
