Show only older posts sidebar widget?

It shouldn’t be that hard to modify the default Recent Posts Widget to do this. Are you comfortable with PHP?

Look in wp-includes/default-widgets.php, find the recent posts widgets, copy it, and paste it into your functions.php. Now rename it. class WP_Widget_Recent_Posts extends WP_Widget { becomes something like class my_only_older_Posts extends WP_Widget {. Also rename the function whose name is identical to the class name. You should probably rename some of the stuff related to caching. Read up on the widget API. Now find the $r = new WP_Query... line. Now digest some query_posts, especially this part. There will be a quiz tomorrow.

Ok. That was a bit mean on my part. 🙂

Find the else if ( $number > 15 ) $number = 15; line. Delete everything after that and up to but not including $cache[$args['widget_id']] = ob_get_flush();. Replace that with:

global $wpdb;
    if (is_single()) global $post;
    else {
      global $posts;
      $post = array_pop($posts);
    }
    $r = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS ".$wpdb->posts.".* FROM ".$wpdb->posts." WHERE 1=1 AND ".$wpdb->posts.".post_type = 'post' AND (".$wpdb->posts.".post_status = 'publish') AND ".$wpdb->posts.".post_date < '$post->post_date' ORDER BY ".$wpdb->posts.".post_date DESC LIMIT 0, $number");
    if ($r) {
      echo $before_widget;
      if ( $title ) echo $before_title . $title . $after_title;
      echo '<ul>';
      foreach ($r as $v) {
        echo '<li><a href="',get_permalink($v->ID),'" title="';
        echo esc_attr($v->post_title ? $v->post_title : $v->ID);
        echo '">';
        if ( $v->post_title ) echo $v->post_title;
        else echo $v->ID;
        echo '</a></li>';
      }
      echo '</ul>'

It seems to work on my end, but it is minimally tested. There could be bugs. Make sure to rename the cache options or your may get weird results.

Arggh… there is a syntax error. A bit of my code got lost. Try this instead.

global $wpdb;
    if (is_single()) global $post;
    else {
      global $posts;
      $post = array_pop($posts);
    }
    $r = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS ".$wpdb->posts.".* FROM ".$wpdb->posts." WHERE 1=1 AND ".$wpdb->posts.".post_type = 'post' AND (".$wpdb->posts.".post_status = 'publish') AND ".$wpdb->posts.".post_date < '$post->post_date' ORDER BY ".$wpdb->posts.".post_date DESC LIMIT 0, $number");
    if ($r) {
      echo $before_widget;
      if ( $title ) echo $before_title . $title . $after_title;
      echo '<ul>';
      foreach ($r as $v) {
        echo '<li><a href="',get_permalink($v->ID),'" title="';
        echo esc_attr($v->post_title ? $v->post_title : $v->ID);
        echo '">';
        if ( $v->post_title ) echo $v->post_title;
        else echo $v->ID;
        echo '</a></li>';
      }
      echo '</ul>';
      echo $after_widget;
      wp_reset_query();  // Restore global post data stomped by the_post().
    }

If it doesn’t work I’ll put the entire working widget in the pastebin.

…wrong that, clearly, isn’t from the code you provided…

Not as clear as you might think :). I’ll post the whole thing somewhere later today.

Ok. I put it here. Caveat emptor: minimally tested and I could have missed some details.

What version of WP are you running? The WP_Widget class is core code but its pretty new (and much much better than old method).

You need to put the function in wp-content/themes/<yourthemename>/functions.php not in wp-includes/functions.php.