WordPress.org

Authors: taylorde, ericmann

This is a very simple plugin that essentially mimics the effect of the "recent posts" widget included with Wordpress, but with the addition of a content preview. The plugin will, by default, display the name of the post (with a link), the date it was published, and a short bit of text from the post.

There is a widget admin panel that allows changing of the title, the number of posts to display, and how many characters to use for the content preview.

Updates:

• 1.2 - Adds two options: "truncate excerpts" allows you to shorten the content that is hand-written in the excerpt field of a new post. "hard truncate" will shorten the preview content to exactly the number of characters you specify.
• 1.1 - Fixed xhtml validation errors that this plugin was causing.

Limitations:

• The plugin strips out any HTML tags from the post before displaying it, so if you are looking to display images -- try a different plugin. Perhaps in future releases this will get more customized.

• At this time the plugin does NOT strip out shortcode (e.g. [shortcode]. Shortcode will not be interpreted, but it will be displayed.