Better Recent Comments vs WP Social Avatar

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

As the name suggests, this plugin allows you to use the social profile picture as your WordPress Avatar. You can see more, on how to install and use the plugin here in this blog WP Social Avatar Why this plugin? If you are me, who gets bore of using the same gravatar for few days or months then this plugin is totally for you. This plugin provides option to the user to use Social media like Facebook and Google plus profile pictures as the gravatar instead of the one from en.gravatar.com. WP Social Avatar Settings: After activating the plugin admin will see WP Avatar, under Users menu. Here the admin can set the minimum role/capabilities required to avail this feature. The allowed users will see the available options in their Your Profile sub menu under Users menu. For the first version I only have two social options available, Facebook and Google plus. You need to add either the Facebook user ID(numeric) or Google plus id in the corresponding fields. You can find your facebook user id here Once done with the above, check the social profile picture you want to use as the gravatar and click Update Profile and you are done. After saving the profile you can see all the gravatars in the site has been replaced by the respective social media profile picture. With this you will get rid of the boredom of looking at the same gravatar all the time. With the change in the respective social media profile picture, the gravatar of your site will also change. With Version 1.4 Cache functionality is implemented for Google Plus avatar, this optimizes the functionality. I have added a clear cache button for Google plus, anytime you upload a new profile picture in your Google Plus account click the “clear cache” button and you will get the latest image else the code will make a request and pull the latest image after every 48 hours. This has been done to make the Google Plus functionality faster.