Note that Fresh Comments 1.2.1 is out.
What is Fresh Comments 1.2?
Fresh Comments 1.1 is a WordPress widget that displays the latest approved comments submitted by your visitors and also gives you - the owner - better control on how your recent comments are displayed. Go straight to download Fresh Comments.
How to install Fresh Comments?
(Click on the icon to configure Fresh Comments.)
Easy. Just download Fresh Comments 1.1 and extract it to your hard disk. Then upload freshcomments.php into your wp-content/plugins folder and then activate the plugin through your admin interface. Finally, check it out in your admin interface at Presentation -> Sidebar Widgets to add or remove Fresh Comments widget by dragging around.
How to configure Fresh Comments?
(Above is the configuration screen of Fresh Comments 1.1. See how Fresh Comments 1.0 look like.)
Here are the configurable options:
- Title - Give the widget a name to be displayed in your blog.
- No. of comments - Number of comments to be displayed in descending chronological order for your fresh comments section. (Only takes a value of ‘1′ or more.)
- No. of words - Displays only the number of words you specify as a comment preview. (Only takes a value of ‘1′ or more.)
- Date/Time format - This allows you to set the format where the date and time would replace %comment_datetime%. Fresh Comments 1.1 uses the PHP date formatting parameters.
- Show trackbacks - Checking this option enables trackbacks to be displayed in Fresh Comments.
- Show pingbacks - Checking this option enables pingbacks to be displayed in Fresh Comments.
- Before - This is where you can insert HTML before all fresh comments are displayed. Recommended that you put
- After - This is where you can insert HTML after all fresh comments are displayed. Recommended that you put
here.
How to format Fresh Comments?
%comment_author%%comment_author_url%%comment_content%%comment_preview%- Displays the first few words of the comments. The number of preview words is specified in the ‘No. of preview words’ option as mentioned above.%post_title%%comment_permalink%- This displays the URI of the comment in your post.%comment_datetime%- This displays the date and time according to the format that you set in ‘Date/Time format’.%post_permalink%- This displays the URI of your post.
Most of the tags are pretty much self explanatory. To add a tag, just click or highlight within the formatting textbox and then click on the tag you wish to insert.
Below are some examples of formats you can use:
Format:
<li><a href="%comment_permalink%">%comment_author% in %post_title%</a>: %comment_preview%</li>Format to HTML:
<li><a href="http://beconfused.com/blog/2006/03/22/busy-week/#comment-9812">Mr. Dew in busy//week</a>: Well, it's okay. I don't think I can do much</li>Displayed in browser:
<li><a href="http://beconfused.com/blog/2006/03/22/busy-week/#comment-9812">Mr. Dew in busy//week</a>: Well, it's okay. I don't think I can do much</li>
Other examples of formats:
<li><a TARGET="_blank" href="%comment_author_url%">%comment_author%</a> in <a href="%comment_permalink%">%post_title%</a>: <a href="%comment_permalink%">%comment_preview% [...]</a></li>
<li><a href="%comment_author_url%">%comment_author%</a> says, <a href="%comment_permalink%">"%comment_preview%..."</a></li>
(Using Fresh Comment widget in your sidebar.)
Additional notes
I followed CSS Drive’s tableless form structure but I used tables where necessary. This release wouldn’t be made possible without the suggestions and request that I have gotten from Herrmueller’s comment, Inkiness’s trackback and Babak’s comment.
If there are any things you spot that is not working, do give me a notice and I’ll fix it as soon as possible. I’m not an experience PHP coder so please forgive me if anythings goes wrong. I tested this on WordPress version 2.03 only but it should work in any version that Sidebar Widgets can support.
The browsers tested are Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and Mozilla Firefox 1.5. It didn’t work on Opera browser but I can’t do anything about it since WordPress Widgets don’t work there anyway.
Note that Fresh Comments 1.2.1 is out.
The source code for Fresh Comments 1.1 is distributed under GPL (General Public License), meaning that you can freely modify and distribute this source code.
Please do comment about my work. 
Tags: blogging, plugins, programming, screenshot, software, widgets, wordpress
[...] Note that Fresh Comments 1.1 is out. [...]
by //beconfused » Blog Archive » fresh//comments (Jul 11, 2006 at 12 PM)Hey, thanks a lot - I’ll give this a try soon so I can get rid of my quick-and-dirty-ish hacked version of 1.0
by herrmueller (Jul 14, 2006 at 12 AM)wow! I am bowled away by the speed with which you updated this. How can I upgrade? Do I have to erase/remove my old plugin? or should I just upload this on top of it? Thanks man, you rock!
by Babak (Jul 15, 2006 at 1 AM)herrmueller: You’re most welcome. Thanks for your suggestion!
Babak: Well, I recommend you to save your display format of Fresh Comment in Notepad or something just in case the upgrade doesn’t take your old settings. You can just overwrite the previous version after that.
by Mr. Dew (Jul 15, 2006 at 6 AM)ok I followed your instructions - wow! It automatically saved my settings and applied them to the upgraded version. Awsome. Thanks again!
by Babak (Jul 18, 2006 at 3 AM)You’re most welcome!
by Mr. Dew (Jul 28, 2006 at 5 PM)Hi there - your plugin is excellent, thank you.
I notice that the latest Wordpress (2.1-alpha2 from Subversion) seems to be incompatible with freshcomments. I now get this message:
You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘ WHERE ID = comment_post_ID AND post_password = ” ]
SELECT comment_ID, comment_post_ID, comment_author, comment_author_url, comment_content, comment_date, post_title FROM , WHERE ID = comment_post_ID AND post_password = ” AND comment_approved = ‘1′ AND comment_type NOT LIKE ‘%back%’ AND (post_status = ‘publish’ OR post_status = ’static’) ORDER BY comment_date DESC LIMIT 0, 6
Is this something you could look at?
by air (Jul 29, 2006 at 11 PM)- Aaron
There isn’t much documentation on WordPress 2.1 yet. I’ll take a look at it though, I think WordPress might have renamed the PHP variable for the table name.
by Mr. Dew (Jul 31, 2006 at 6 AM)That was the hint I needed! Thank you.
Knock out the globals $tablecomments and $tableposts, then replace them with $wpdb->comments and $wpdb->posts respectively.
by air (Aug 1, 2006 at 2 AM)You’re most welcome! Thanks for informing me about it too. I noticed it says ‘post_title FROM , WHERE’ and the table name seemed to be missing.
by Mr. Dew (Aug 1, 2006 at 8 PM)This is a great plugin and I used it on some of my websites. Thank you very much!
by Patrick (Nov 4, 2006 at 1 AM)Now I wanted to configure it to show me only the comments for the current category on the category archive. So I added “, post_category” to line 182 to get the category of the post from the database and then added “if (is_category((string)$comment->post_category)) {” after line 192 (start of the “foreach ($comments as $comment)”) and closing the bracket before the end of the foreach-loop. Still I get all comments. I’m a newbie to php so if anybody can give me a hint how to get this modification, this would be great!
It’s a very nice plugin, but i have a little problem with it. When i put “” into the Before-Field everything is okay. But when i put “”into it, everytime i reload the settingspage there stands “
by Wini (Dec 20, 2006 at 11 PM)[...] Fresh Comments 1.2 is a WordPress widget that displays the latest approved comments submitted by your visitors and also gives you – the owner – better control on how your recent comments are displayed. Go straight to download Fresh Comments. [...]
by //beconfused » Blog Archive » Fresh Comments 1.2 (WordPress 2.1 compatible) (Jan 20, 2007 at 9 AM)Hi, I’m using your widget and I find it really cool.
by fmf (Mar 3, 2007 at 12 AM)But I have a little problem: I have a small sidebar so of someone write a long word in one comment the preview doesn’t wrap and goes out of the sidebar bound with a really ugly effect. You can see actually at my blog.
Any idea to avoid this?
Thanks in advance.
It seem to look fine in my browser, my browser is Opera 9.1 and Windows Internet Explorer 7.0.
by Mr. Dew (Mar 3, 2007 at 9 AM)Can’t you see the comment that contains the link:
http://scandaloitaliano.wordpress.com/
going outbound?
With IE7 I see it.
Anyway, even if you cannot see it, hope question is clear: if someone enter a long string in a comment, something like:
123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890
it couldn’t be syllabized and goes outbound.
by fmf (Mar 5, 2007 at 5 PM)(Sorry for my english…)
I don’t think there is a way of correcting that. One way is to use CSS property break-word but it is IE only. I’m not sure of other methods. It’s recommended that you use scripts in servers to detect word text and insert spaces inside.
by Mr. Dew (Mar 12, 2007 at 6 AM)Thanks for this great plugin. It would encourage visitor to give comments. However I need to exclude my own comments from showing. Is it possible to make that ? and what syntax I should add to get this.
by T1ps (Mar 16, 2007 at 4 PM)That feature isn’t supported at the moment, I’ll look into it for future versions.
by Mr. Dew (Mar 21, 2007 at 2 PM)