Recent posts plugin to create a useful widget?
Do you want to keep your visitors stay longer in your blog? If yes, you do, giving easier navigation such as popular post, random post, best wordpress widgets for sidebars, even recent post widget which is generated by default without recent posts plugin is very useful.
As you can see in my sidebar I have a recent post which may called in another blogs as “latest posts” or “latest articles” and so forth.
They may use any titles they like and they can play around with the most “inviting” titles so the visitors want to click them, but they do have the same functions, which is, showing your latest and the most recent posts.
With that function, every readers that visits your blog, especially the new ones, they will see what are the newest article you have wrote.
I do not use any recent posts plugin in this blog, and I will tell you why in the article below..
Recent posts plugin — Reasons why I don’t use any plugins
Now, if you want to install recent posts plugin which is more advanced than the default ones, you can try this advanced recent posts plugin from wordpress.org plugin directory.
I choose not to use any additional for the recent posts is because we can add this manually using default widget from our dashboard.
I will post the steps below. My reasons why I don’t use a recent posts plugin is because the widget is already existing right after you install wordpress blog, out of the box.
It means, you can display recent post widgets without installing any plugins.
You can, however add some thumbnails or images as the plugin mentioned above will do if for you. But I personally avoid using too much images, especially because I don’t host my images in a CDN, or cookieless domains.
Installing additional plugin which is not really necessarry, and having too much images in non-cookieless domains will only slow down blog loading speed.
Recent posts plugin — How does a recent post widget displayed?
So here is the steps to display recent posts in your sidebar:
I assume that you are familiar about how to use widgets in wordpress 3, so it can be easier to follow this tutorial, also a reason why I do not make any videos.
1. In your dashboard, in the left sidebar, go to “Appearance” and then “Widgets”
2. Here, find “Recent posts”.
3. Drag and drop them in the sidebar that is available in your theme files.
What I mean by this is, every theme has different amount of sidebar, even sometimes has widgetized footer, which means, you can place it in your footer too.
But most of themes gives ability to have widgets in sidebars.
4. You can then modify how it will look. (see screenshot below).
Recent posts widgets settings
In the above image, I typed “My Recent Posts” for the title.
And 15 for “” option. You can have 5, or 10.
This number will show the most newest articles in your blog. For instance, you typed, 5 for the number, then your five most recent posts will appear.
5. Click “Save” button if you are done, refresh you page you will see your widgets.
Unless you have a cache plugin, you will immediately see the recent posts without using any recent posts plugin.
