Recent Comments Plugin

I’ve always like “RecentComments” features, and so I went looking for one. There are a couple of different ones floating around, but this one seemed simple, and simple is usually just about right. I installed it then modified the sidebar with this code:

<li><h2>Recent Comments</h2>
<ul><?php mdv_recent_comments(6, 30, ‘<li>’, ‘</li>’, true, 0); ?></ul></li>

The parameters for the function are:

$no_comments – sets the number of recent comments to display
$comment_lenth – the number of characters to display as a comment excerpt
$before – text to be displayed before the link to the recent comment
$after – text to be displayed after the link to the recent comment
$show_pass_post – whether or not to display comments from password protected posts
$comment_style – sets the style of comment to be used

• 1 = “CommenterName on PostTitle” with CommenterName being a link to the comment
• 0 = “CommenterName: WordsOfComment” with WordsOfComment being a link to the comment

I made some changes to the plugin…

• Changed from showing a certain number of words per comment to a certain number of letters.
• Removed any trailing spaces and added “…” to the end of the comment text.
• Formatted the title of the link a little differently