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customizable post listings plugin

Is there a quick way to exclude a single category, or will I have to list all the categories IDs that I want to show? Either way it is just about what I am looking for.

Everything seems to work as described except when I try to use $authors, which produces the following error:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /blah/blah/blah/wp-content/plugins/customizable-post-listings.php on line 76

Database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ') GROUP BY wp_posts.ID ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC LIMIT 1, 5' at line 1]
SELECT DISTINCT * FROM wp_posts WHERE wp_posts.post_date <= '2004-09-03 14:49:04' AND wp_posts.post_status = 'publish' AND wp_posts.post_password = '' AND ( ) GROUP BY wp_posts.ID ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC LIMIT 1, 5

Thanks, but doesn’t seem to do the trick. Tried 1.01 and, using (1, “%post_URL%
%post_excerpt_short%”, “”, “date”, “DESC”, 0, “m/d/Y”, “1″, false), now get:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /blah/blah/blah/wp-content/plugins/customizable-post-listings.php on line 76

Database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax near ') GROUP BY wp_posts.ID ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC LIMIT 0, 1' at line 1]
SELECT DISTINCT * FROM wp_posts WHERE wp_posts.post_date <= '2004-09-03 16:05:05' AND wp_posts.post_status = 'publish' AND wp_posts.post_password = '' AND ( ) GROUP BY wp_posts.ID ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC LIMIT 0, 1
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in //blah/blah//wp-content/plugins/customizable-post-listings.php on line 140

Hmm, it seems to work for me trying what you indicated. It’s almost as if the function isn’t seeing the value of $authors. (The second bug being reported on line 140 is a result of the first bug, and trivial to fix.) You are calling the c2c_get_recent_posts() function, or one of the other two? Would you be up for me suggesting some debugging suggestions (or I could send you some debugging versions of the plugin) to try to track down the problem?

I am using the sticky posts hack and due to this I get this error for the comment part.

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in c:\sites\single1\easydoesit\webroot\wp-content\plugins\customizable-post-listings.php on line 140

I’m sure Ill get this when my lates post becomes a sticky too.
Do you have a way to get around this because I really want this plugin on my site.

First off, I have updated the plugin with a slight tweak, so it is now up to version 1.02.

Trevor: If you are comfortable with modifying the plugin code for debugging purposes, obtain the latest and where you see this line:

$auths = explode(' ', $authors);

Add a line before and two after it so it looks like this:

echo "authors = ($authors)<br />";
$auths = explode(' ', $authors);
echo "auths ( "; print_r($auths); echo " )<br />";
echo "is_array? (".is_array($auths).")<br />";

Let me know what it says for your site.

Thanks Scott. Now there is no error message and, with author ID=1 selected, posts for all authors are displayed, prefixed by:

authors = (1)
auths ( Array ( [0] => 1 ) )
is_array? (1)

Beth: You can send the date format as one of the arguments to the function. The date format you want, i.e. 31/08/2004 (Aug 31, 2004), is achieved through the date format of ‘d/m/Y’. You would use that like so:

<?php c2c_get_recent_posts (5, "<li>%post_date%: %post_URL%</li>", '', 'date', 'DESC', 0, 'd/m/Y'); ?>

(you have to explicitly define all the arguments before the $date_format argument)

Or, alternatively, you could change the default value for the $date_format argument for each of the three functions by modifying the plugin file. Which, if you do, you should make note of so that in the event you upgrade the plugin you know what you need to change again (since upgrading will overwrite the plugin file).

Josh: Yes, but you have to change a value within the plugin file itself. Look for these lines in the function c2c_get_recent_tagmap():

//-- Some things you might want to configure -----
$excerpt_words = 6;  // Number of words to use for %post_excerpt_short%
$excerpt_length = 50;   // Number of characters to use for %post_excerpt_short%, only used if $excerpt_words is 0

Modify those to your liking. Keep in mind that in the format string you’ll want to use %post_excerpt_short%, which will honor the above settings, as opposed to %post_excerpt% which is the user- or WP- generated excerpt.

Like the code commenting says, if you want to limit by number of words, change the value of $excerpt_words to something else if the default of 6 doesn’t suit you. Or it you want the excerpt to be limited by number of characters, change $excerpt_words to 0 and change the value of $excerpt_length.

Does that accomplish what you need?

Hi, Scott, another great plugin.
I wonder if it’s possible to use a substitution tag in order to show the name of the category the post belong to, I mean, an output similar to this:
* Personal: post_title …
* Software: post titlel
etc

Thanks

Trevor: Sorry to have taken so long to follow up with you. On a test blog I tried to recreate your problem but have so far been unsuccessful. I had a second author (with the most recent overall post), and when I indicated I only wanted posts for author ’1′, the post for author ’2′ got skipped. If I didn’t specify an author, all posts were considered. And after examing the code, I can’t see a reason why it wouldn’t work like it’s supposed to. I’ll keep looking at it, but so far I’m coming up empty on it.

poper: I’ll add some sort of category substitution tag in the next release.

Thanks Scott. The date problem was easily fixed when I was feeling more alert. Sorry to have been stupid about it – blame Plugin Overload.

I list all the recent days posts on my blog so really would like the Recent list to list the previous n posts on days!=today.

Can that be done?

Thanks

Beth

great plugin scott, i’m just going to implement it on a site.

using the most recent posts function, is there an easy way of only printing the date once, so you get a date, followed by all of the posts under that date, without printing another date until all of the posts for that date have been printed, and it is on to another date? eg:

19/10/2004:
Random Post 1
Random Post 2
Random Post 3

18/10/2004:
Random Post 4
Random Post 5 etc. ?

Thank you Scott.

I’ve been looking at the code to see if I can modify it to meet a request from my users but a dunce like me needs significantly more comments in the code before attempting such ambition.

My users would like a single list of recently updated/added material so that new posts, edited posts, AND commented posts all appear in the one list. I’m trying to make get_recently_modified to do the trick for me and failing miserably. I *think* what my users want to see is a single list that would give:

Post Subject with link, Number of Comments – may be zero if new post – with link to most recent comment, and Author/Date/Time of the post/comment most recently added or edited.

I said I would try but it seems beyond me. Can you offer any pointers on where to modify the code in order to get a single list?

Thanks

Excellent plugin! I hit one little snag while installing that, hopefully, will have a quick solution:

I need to exlcude category nine (as it is my miniblog) from the ‘Recent Entries’ section of my new design. I’m using the following bit of code:

<?php c2c_get_recent_posts(4, "<dd>%post_URL%</dd>\n", '1,3,4,5,6,7,8', 'date', 'DESC', 1); ?>

It seems that, in doing so, the posts no longer sort by date – they sort by category, then date. Most of my entries are in categories one and eight and those in category eight are not even being included in the sort.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Plugin updated to v1.1

This release features these changes:

* Added the ability to get random posts, and added the convenience function c2c_get_random_posts() to get them
* Functions will now consider sticky posts (those in which ‘post_status’ gets set to ‘sticky’) in addition to published posts
* Changed license from BSD-new to MIT

Scott, I have an suggestion for a feature regarding c2c_get_recent_posts. Let’s say I’m viewing the single/permalink page of a “recent” entry and I’m showing the last 5 recent entries in the sidebar. It would be nice if the recent entries list excluded the permalink page I’m currently viewing from the list. It’s unnecessary to display that particular recent entry link it if I’m currently on that page. Just something to think about.

Tyrone: Thanks for pointing out the issue regarding the use of htmlspecialchars(). I’ll go back and review why I put it there in the first place and verify that it needs taking out. Also, thanks for your other suggestion; I’ll give it some consideration.

Lawrence: WordPress doesn’t keep track of when/how often posts get read, so that information isn’t readily available to this plugin. There are plugins that allow you to keep track of that information. I’m not familiar with how they’re designed. Unless they are designed in a very specific way (by adding visitor counts to a new column in the wp_posts table) it is unlikely you can use this plugin without modification to take advantage of that data. Otherwise, you’ll either have to use another plugin for all your “most popular posts” needs, or modify this plugin to take advantage of the info the other plugin has recorded.

wow…

thank you for this killer update to your already very useful plugins.

when you said you “might look into it…” i crossed my fingers, but i bet nobody expected such a comprehensive, well documented, update.

awesome.

thank you.

i’m having trouble displaying the recent posts from a certain category. the code i’ve tried:

<?php c2c_get_recent_posts(5, "photography"); ?>
<?php c2c_get_recent_posts(5, 'photography'); ?>
<?php c2c_get_recent_posts(5, photography); ?>

photography is a category and there are sufficient posts in it…

It might be interesting to add the ability to get the active plugins. I’ve been messing around a bit and I’m just not good enough to make it work. It seems to me that the only table that contains that info is wp_options under ‘active_plugins’ but I don’t know if it’s possible to get more info about the plugin itself – url, author, etc from the sqldb. Even so, it would be cool to add the ability to show which plugins are active.

Thanks for the great tool!

Hello Scott!

Wow, wonderful plugin! Thanks a lot!

I wonder if it could be implemented a %comment_excerpt_short% tag! It would be nice to display the beggining of the comments on the side bar!

Keep on the great work!!

Cheers,

oculos

Great plugin. Thank you very much!

But I have some problem. With function:
<?php c2c_get_recent_posts(10,"<li><span class="recent-post-date">%post_date%</span>: %post_URL%<br />by: %post_author_posts%</li>",'','date','DESC','10','d F Y',''); ?>

In database table wp_users, the authors that didn’t have “user_nicename” column, will not show up their URL. Instead, will show something like:
some.site.com/berita/arsip/author// for, example, user with ID =7

How do geet I show those author that didn’t have nice name? is it my blog configuration?

Excellent plugin. I had written my own to do similar things, but with some added functionality. I’ve since modified yours to add the functionality I desired. You are welcome to roll these mods in if you wish.

* Added support for excluding categories. As in the rest of WordPress, simply provide a list of negative categories separated by commas (e.g. ‘-27,-28′) for the $categories parameter.
* Added support for listing of post categories as well as links to category archives (with customizable delimiter).
* Added support for links to comments section for fancy comments.

Hopefully someone will find it useful. To see them in action, hit the website link above: the sidebar displays the 5 most recent entries that aren’t in my ‘Asides’ or ‘Currently’ categories and the bottom of the index uses new category links and fancy comment links.

Here’s a link to the updated code.

Thanks again for the good code to add on to.

First off, thanks everyone for the kind words. Now on to the answers:

amory: There are two things you would need to address in the examples you provided. The second argument lets the plugin know how to output the text from the posts once it has found them (i.e. did you want to show the post’s date, content, excerpt, etc). The third argument is where you specify the category(ies). But instead of using the category name you have to use the category id (you can find the category id in the “categories” page of the admin section of your blog). Assuming photography had an id of 3, here is an example to list the post titles of the 5 most recent posts in the photography category:
<ul><?php c2c_get_recent_posts(5, "<li>%post_URL%</li>", '5'); ?>

Paul Hoch: You might want to check out the Plugins Used plugin, which allows you to display info about the plugins driving your blog.

Stefan Liden: I haven’t looked at Exhibit Engine so I can’t say what is involved in adding thumbnails from it as a percent substitution string, but I’ll keep it in mind for possible future inclusion.

oculos: Great suggestion! I’ll see about including it in the next version of the plugin.

Tin: I’ll have to take a look at the WP code to see if there are already provisions to do what you want. My guess is that WP allows for what you want.

Gede Wijaya: I’ll have to look into your issue farther. As far as I know, the user_nicename database field is supposed to be auto-generated by WP. If it isn’t, I’ll have to take it into account in a subsequent release of this plugin.

Mi: Getting errors about header information already being sent is usually a result of the plugin file having a space or other characters before the <?php at the start of the file or after the ?> at the end of the file.

You’re welcome. Take a gander… I essentially reused the ideas from the WordPress exclusion code.

I’m still working on things… this is a very fresh project (this morning) as I add functionality like the Asides to my site. Hence, it’s sort of a moving target. I’ve already added another replacement (%comment_number_url%) and I’m now returned the actual number of posts returned so that people that need to know that can get that information easily.

Again, nice plugin… saved me some work!

Latest additions available here.

Thanks, Scott! I didn’t realize I had whitespace. It’s working like a charm now~

Paul,

Any way you could provide a link?

This almost certainly sounds like a CSS issue. This plugin merely outputs the information extracted from the database in whatever format you specify. It’s up to your CSS to style it appropriately.

Thank you Scott!! This is an excellent plugin. I used it to show the most recent posts on my website, which is in a different directory than my blog. Nicely done!

I would like to use c2c_get_recent_posts on two different pages for two different sets of categories and two different offset values. It seems I’m not able to do this because the config is done in the plugin itself, rather than by passing arguments in the page. It looks like the only argument you allow for within the page itself is the number of entries. Would be great if things were handled in an array on the page itself like…

[?php c2c_get_recently_modified(num_posts=5&
categories=21,23,34&offset=2); ?]

That way this could be used in a lot of different ways on different pages. Or maybe that’s already possible and I’m missing something? Thank you…

ColdForged: I still haven’t had the time to meaningfully look at your contributions, but will do so soon. Thanks again!

Ryan: I think you are overlooking in the instructions the other arguments to the various Customizable Post Listings functions. What you ask for (listing only posts in certain categories and using an offset) are supported, among other things (i.e. only gettings posts posted by certain author(s), customizing the output string, etc). Note that I define the arguments one to a line in the instructions above, like so:

function c2c_get_recent_posts ($num_posts = 5,
 $format = "<li>%post_date%: %post_URL%</li>",
 $categories = '',
 $orderby = 'date',
 $order = 'DESC',
 $offset = 0,
 $date_format = 'm/d/Y',
 $authors = '',
 $include_passworded_posts = false)

Scott… I think I get it now, re: your comment #69 above. Looks like this plugin already does what I want… thanks much!!

Is this plugin compatible with the use of [!--more--] to divide teaser text, as discussed at wordpress.org/docs/reference/post/

pps – Now I see how I can run some PHP to display excerpt or content based on conditions… I just have to do something like:

< ?php
$string = [ ...sundry formatting and code... ];
c2c_get_recent_posts (9999, "$string", '10', 'date', 'DESC', 2, 'F Y', '', false); ?>

all is well!

OK, I don’t mean to turn this page into my personal journal, but here’s how to test for an excerpt, for what it’s worth… put this function in template-functions-post.php:

function get_excerpt_status() { // don’t forget to mark your hack
global $id, $post;
global $test_for_excerpt;
$output = ”;
$output = trim(stripslashes($post->post_excerpt));
if ($output != ”) {
$test_for_excerpt = ‘pos’; // no excerpt
} else {
$test_for_excerpt = ‘neg’; // there’s an excerpt
}
}

…then on your web page you can do something like this…

[?php
get_excerpt_status();
if ($test_for_excerpt == 'pos') {
$formatting = blahblahblah;
} else {
$formatting = blahblahblah;
}
c2c_get_recent_posts (9999, "$formatting", '10?, 'date', 'DESC', 2, 'F Y', '', false);
?]

This is a great plug in which I’ve been using for a while for my ‘most recent comments’ sidebar section. Everything works as advertised, but I’m having a problem which by reading comments of others I think may not have come up yet, but I can’t image why — or maybe I just missed it.

On my site I restrict comments to registered users and have a few regular readers give me insightful comments once in a while. Every time I post however I normally will link back to previous articles — creating a pickback comment. eg. […] re going for the sealed temperature controlled house you might opt for something like this energy efficient sealed house The basement with glass to th […]

What I want to do is to omit these pingbacks from the most recently commented list — since now someone who really wanted to see what is drawing comments will pull up a lot of posts which just have my own ping backs.

Can you advise the best way to accomplish this (eliminate the pingbacks from the most recent comments)?

Thanks for a great job and great hack!

Ryan: I’ll add a tag to the next version that indicates the excerpt, if present, should be shown, otherwise the post content will be shown. No worries about posting ideas/suggestions/solutions here, I appreciate the input. Hope you can hold out to the next release.

dozer: Nice suggestion. I’ll include more pingback and trackback stuff in the next release. In the meantime, if you wanted to try a hack to keep pingbacks from being seen as comments by this plugin, do the following in the plugin file:

In the function c2c_get_recent_posts, at line 65 you should see this:

if ($add_recent_comment_to_sql) $sql .= "AND $tableposts.ID = $tablecomments.comment_post_ID AND $tablecomments.comment_approved = '1' ";

Change it to this:

if ($add_recent_comment_to_sql) $sql .= "AND $tableposts.ID = $tablecomments.comment_post_ID AND $tablecomments.comment_approved = '1' AND $tablecomments.comment_content NOT LIKE '%&lt&;pingback />%'";

Line 139 was this:

return $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $tablecomments WHERE comment_post_ID = '$post_id'");

Change it to this:

return $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $tablecomments WHERE comment_post_ID = '$post_id' AND comment_content NOT LIKE '%&lt&;pingback />%'");

Line 171 was this:

$comment = $wpdb->get_row("SELECT * FROM $tablecomments WHERE comment_post_ID = '$post->ID' AND comment_approved = '1' ORDER BY comment_date DESC LIMIT 1");

Change it to this:

$comment = $wpdb->get_row("SELECT * FROM $tablecomments WHERE comment_post_ID = '$post->ID' AND comment_approved = '1' AND comment_content NOT LIKE '%&lt&;pingback />%' ORDER BY comment_date DESC LIMIT 1");

So 3 lines that need changing. If that looks daunting, you can wait until the next release, but it really isn’t that much for you to change if you were so inclined. The official version will have easy options to control whether pingbacks and trackbacks should be considered or not.

Alan: For listing the posts by month, what you probably want is the Sortable Nicer Archives plugin.

As for the %comment_excerpt_short% tag, in the next release of the plugin I’ll include a tag that does just that (though likely named different).

Scott, thanks for the hack. I had already done something similar, but didn’t catch all the changes, so the comment counter wasn’t consistant. Anyway, reistalled it per your instructions and it works great. Now pingbacks are excluded……

Jascha: I’ll include the ability to include static pages in the plugin’s various functions in the next release. If you want to be able to do this in the meantime, you’ll have to change a few lines in the plugin file. To minimize the number of code changes I tell you (if you want to pursue it), what exactly did you want to be able to do (just a “most recent static pages” listing)?

As for excluding the most recent post from the list, that is achieved by setting the $offset argument to any of the plugin’s functions. The value for offset indicates how many posts to skip. Set it to 1 and it’ll skip the most recent post.

I’m having issues using the $categories tag with the $offset tag.

Code looks a-like this:
< ?php c2c_get_recent_posts($num_posts=1,
$format = "%post_excerpt%",
$offset = 1,
$categories = 2); ?>

Error is:

Database error: [Unknown column 'wp_testposts.post_2' in 'order clause']
SELECT DISTINCT * FROM wp_testposts LEFT JOIN wp_testpost2cat ON (wp_testposts.ID = wp_testpost2cat.post_id) WHERE wp_testposts.post_date <= ’2005-01-13 12:59:35′ AND ( wp_testposts.post_status = ‘publish’ OR wp_testposts.post_status = ‘sticky’ ) AND wp_testposts.post_password = ” AND ( wp_testpost2cat.category_id = ’1′ ) GROUP BY wp_testposts.ID ORDER BY wp_testposts.post_2 DESC LIMIT 0, 1

My intention is to use your plugin function in a loop, so I can do some more specific formatting (within table cells, etc.). To do this, I intend on setting $num_posts to one, $categories to whichever category the “index” is for, and $offset to an incremented variable within the loop.

Of course, I can’t get this to work from the singular instance I have at the top.

Thomas: In order to specify the value for a function’s argument, you must also specify the values for arguments that appear before that argument. You must also specify the arguments in the order they were defined by function.

Here is probably what you wanted to use:

<?php c2c_get_recent_posts(1, "%post_excerpt%", "2", "date", "DESC", 1); ?>

I’m getting an error when I save posts:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /usr/home/spitf10/www/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/customizable-post-listings.php:306) in /usr/home/spitf10/www/htdocs/wp-admin/post.php on line 340

I checked to make sure there’s no leading or trailing white space in the plugin file. I also re-copied your source from this page (v 1.1) into the file and uploaded. When I deactive the plugin, problem disappears. Reactivate, it’s back.

Scott, I’m using your plugin to pull up dinamic content for my site, but its not a blog, so I had no need for “the loop” showing the rest of the posts. But by removing “the loop” from index.php and using your functions exclusively, disables alot of functions such as search, post popups, and coments. Any sugestions on how to retain all the functionality of “the loop” without showing all the posts?

Just another request for a %comment_excerpt_short% function.
This would be particularly useful for the author and I think enticing to those reading and already aware of recent post titles which often are present already on the page.

Great plug in thank you!

Anton: Your question is probably a multi-part question, with different answers for different parts. So it really depends on what exactly you are asking for. The “loop” does set global variables that other functions rely upon for typical “in the loop” sorts of activities, in which case many of those functions wouldn’t work properly. I’m sure there are certain sorts of things that could be added to this plugin, or could be hacked in some way. Point out specific things you are looking to do and I can tell you how necessary the loop is for them.

Pierre: I anticipate improved category support, including the case which you brought up, in a future version. Complex category handling can be tricky, so how much I implement and when is still up in the air.

Nathan: Rest assured a comment_excerpt substitution tag will be included in the next release.

Mark: You have the wrong plugin developer. You probably want ColdForged.

Thank you so much! This is just what I wanted for my small piece of the Internet. Works like a charm.

I’m very new to this system, and this is the first plugin im attempting to use.

I have problems installing it though:

I followed the installation instructions but it does not work. I simply placed the function:

function c2c_get_recent_posts ($num_posts = 5,
 $format = "<li>%post_date%: %post_URL%</li>",
 $categories = '',
 $orderby = 'date',
 $order = 'DESC',
 $offset = 0,
 $date_format = 'm/d/Y',
 $authors = '',
 $include_passworded_posts = false)

in the index.php as it said, between < ? php tags. However I then get this error:

Parse error: parse error, unexpected ';', expecting '{' in /home/fhlinux198/i/ifmicecouldmovemountains.com/user/htdocs/news/index.php on line 64. Line 64 is the: line. If I add a ‘{‘ it bring up yet another error.