Advanced Comments Widget

Let’s face it, the default Recent Comments widget is kind of lame. There’s no user avatar, no comment blurb; nothing to draw you into the conversations happening on the site. What’s the point of showing recent comments on your site if they don’t prompt your viewers to leave their own?

That’s where the Advanced Comments Widget comes in.

Features/Options

This widget provides a range of features; allowing you to customize your recent comments list to match your site’s layout and theme.

Option: Widget Title

Similar to the default Recent Comments widget, the Advanced Comments Widget allows you to set a custom title for your comment list. The default setting is “Recent Comments”, but you can change it to whatever you’d like, or leave it blank.

Option: Post Types

Want to build a list of comments based on a specific post type? With the Advanced Comments Widget, it’s as easy as selecting an option from a dropdown. This widget auto-detects all the registered post types on your site–that have commenting enabled–and adds them to this option in the widget form. This option defaults to “post”.

Option: Pingbacks and Trackbacks

Recent comment lists are a great way to add user-generated content to your site. Listing trackbacks and pingbacks don’t really add value to your sidebar. The Advanced Comments Widget gives you the option to either include or exclude pingbacks and trackbacks from your comment list. The default setting is “exclude”.

Option: Number of Comments

The Advanced Comments Widget lets you easily set the number of comments you want to display.

Option: Comment Order

Generally, comment lists in sidebars are set to display the newest comments first. There may be times when you want older comments to appear first. The Advanced Comments Widget gives you the option of ordering by newer or older comments. The default setting is to display newer comments first.

Option: Comment Avatars

Add some characters to your comment list! The Advanced Comments Widget gives you the option to include the comment author’s avatar when displaying his/her comment. What’s more, you can also set the size of the displayed avatar to fit with your site’s overall look and style. And even better, you can preview your size before saving. No more guessing and adjusting!

Option: Comment Excerpts

In addition to avatars, the Advanced Comments Widget also has the option to include comment excerpts in your comment lists. You can also easily set the excerpt length to fit within your site’s design.

Option: Comment Format

Gone are the days of being forced into a set html structure for your comments! The Advanced Comments Widget lets you select the list structure for your comments. Want to display them as an ordered list? Sure thing! An unordered list? You bet! Just want to wrap them in div tags? Not a problem. Don’t know which one to choose? Not to worry! The Advanced Comments Widget auto-detects whether or not your site supports html5 comments and set the defaults accordingly.

The Resulting List

With a little bit of styling (to keep it in-style with your site) the resulting list can look similar to this:

Installation

As of this writing, the plugin is awaiting review by the plugin team at the WordPress.org repository, but in the meantime, you can download and install off of GitHub. Just follow the instructions below.

Update March 21, 2016: The plugin has been approved by the Review Team and is now available on the WordPress plugin repository: https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-comments-widget/

From the WordPress.org plugin repository:

1. Download and install using the built in WordPress plugin installer.
2. Activate in the “Plugins” area of your admin by clicking the “Activate” link.
3. No further setup or configuration is necessary; just head over to your Widgets area to add to your sidebar.

From GitHub:

1. Download the latest stable version.
2. Extract the zip folder to your plugins directory.
3. Activate in the “Plugins” area of your admin by clicking the “Activate” link.
4. No further setup or configuration is necessary; just head over to your Widgets area to add to your sidebar.

Usage

Using it out of the box is really straight-forward. The Advanced Comments Widget functions like any other widget for WordPress. You can either configure one it through the Widgets screen in your WordPress Dashboard (Appearance > Widgets) or through your the Customizer (Appearance > Customizer).

Note: Unlike the default Recent Comments widget that comes pre-installed with WordPress, the Advanced Comments Widget assigns unique IDs to each list created. So feel free to create as many comment lists with as many configurations as you’d like!

A Note for Developers

This widget was built not only with end-users in mind, but also plugin developers. Almost every aspect of this widget is extensible through filters and action hooks. You can even add your own form fields to the widget form!

• Need to remove a field from the widget form? Not a problem! Every field is passed through its own filter for easy customization.
• Need to modify the output of the widget? Easy! The output is passed through numerous filters, allowing you to customize the comment list to meet your project’s requirements.

Check back soon for a full list of developer features as well as some sample functions! The developer docs are now available here: ACW Developer Docs