Recent Posts Widget With ThumbnailsbyMartin Stehle

List the most recent posts with post titles, thumbnails, excerpts, authors, categories, dates and more!

The plugin is available in English, Spanish (Español), German (Deutsch), Persian (فارسی), Arabic (العربية), Polish (Polski) Russian (русский), Turkish (Türkçe), Japanese (日本語) and Greek (Ελληνικά).

Although the plugin is build only for widget areas users reported that it works also in Elementor. Whether it runs in other page builders is unknown. Please let me know in which page builder you were able to use the plugin successfully.

The plugin does not collect any personal data, so it is ready for EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance.

Lightweight, simple and effective

No huge widget with hundreds of options. This plugin is based on the well-known WordPress default widget ‘Recent Posts’ and extended to display more informations about the posts like e.g. thumbnails, excerpts and assigned categories. And it provides more options to build custom-taylored posts lists.

The thumbnails will be built from the featured image of a post or of the first image in the post content. If there is neither a featured image nor a content image then you can define a default thumbnail.

You can set the width and heigth of the thumbnails in the list. The thumbnails appear left-aligned to the post titles in left-to-right languages. In right-to-left languages they appear right-aligned.

What users wrote

• بهترین افزونه های نمایش آخرین نوشته ها در وردپرس in ابزارک آخرین نوشته وردپرس by Ghodsi on December 16, 2019
• Another good all around widget, suitable for most projects in Free WordPress recent posts widget – Which one is the best? on December 3, 2019
• In just a few clicks, your website will look considerably more established and professional. in 3 Best WordPress Thumbnail Plugins to Manage Images Perfectly by HubSpot Staff on October 29, 2019
• The best of the recent posts widgets in the reviews by noddemix on June 13, 2019
• Number 8 in 14 Plugins para Otimizar seu Site by Ideias Dig on November 8, 2018
• “Truly EXCELLENT Plugin!” in the reviews by dnuttal on October 11, 2018
• “Easier than making an egg, seriously.” in the reviews by djackofall on October 2, 2017
• “This plugin is INCREDIBLE” in the reviews by lucio7 on August 25, 2017
• Widgets Users Will Love in 10 Ultra-Useful Free WordPress Widget Plugins by Eric Karkovack on June 16, 2017
• listed in 20 WordPress Plugins that Steals Attention to Engage Visitors of Your Site by WP Team Support on March 6, 2017
• Number 1 in 8 essential WordPress widgets to supercharge your website by Rafay Ansari on January 31, 2017
• “Excellent (after trying a few)!” in the reviews by giorgissimo on January 6, 2017

What users filmed

Some users published video tutorials on YouTube:

• Class 09 – Working with Plugins (Recent Posts Widget With Thumbnails) by WordPress Learning Bangladesh on March 7, 2017
• Recent Posts Widget With Thumbnails Setup Tutorial – WordPress Lesson and Tip by Making a Website on April 17, 2016
• Add Recent Posts Widget with Thumbnail – WordPress by eMediaCoach on August 15, 2015

Options you can set

1. Title of the widget
2. Number of listed posts
3. Open post links in new windows
4. Random order of posts
5. Hide current post in list
6. Show only sticky posts
7. Hide sticky posts
8. Keep sticky posts on top of the list if not hidden
9. Hide post title
10. Maximum length of post title
11. Show post author
12. Show post categories
13. Show post category names as links to their archives
14. Label for categories
15. Show post date
16. Show post excerpt
17. Show number of comments
18. Excerpt length
19. Signs after excerpt
20. Ignore post excerpt field as excerpt source (builds excerpts only from the post content)
21. Ignore post content as excerpt source (builds excerpts only from the excerpt fields)
22. Show posts of selected categories (or of all categories)
23. Show post thumbnail (featured image)
24. Registered thumbnail dimensions
25. Thumbnail width in px
26. Thumbnail height in px
27. Keep aspect ratio of thumbnails
28. Try to take the first post image as thumbnail
29. Only use the first post image as thumbnail
30. Use default thumbnail if no thumbnail is available
31. Always use the default thumbnail
32. Default thumbnail URL
33. Print slugs of post categories in class attribute of LI elements
34. Print inline CSS instead of creating a CSS file
35. No CSS generation at all

Much more options available in the Pro version

If you want to build your special posts lists with additional options for layout, informations about each post and embedding via shortcode take a look at the plugin Ultimate Post List Pro.

Useful hints for developers: Supported Hooks

The plugin considers the output of actions hooked on:

1. widget_title
2. rpwwt_widget_posts_args
3. rpwwt_the_excerpt (for manual excerpts only)
4. the_excerpt (for all excerpts, is also applied after ‘rpwwt_the_excerpt’)
5. rpwwt_excerpt_more
6. rpwwt_excerpt_length
7. rpwwt_list_cats (for the category list in the backend)
8. rpwwt_categories (for the category list on the website)

Useful hints for developers: Available CSS Selectors

To design the list and its items you can use these CSS selectors:

The elements which contain the posts lists:
.rpwwt-widget

The lists which contain the list items:
.rpwwt-widget ul

All list items in the lists:
.rpwwt-widget ul li

All list items of sticky posts in the lists:
.rpwwt-widget ul li.rpwwt-sticky

All links in the lists; every link contains the image and the post title:
.rpwwt-widget ul li a

All images in the lists (use that to set the margins around images):
.rpwwt-widget ul li a img

All post titles in the lists:
.rpwwt-widget ul li a span.rpwwt-post-title

All post author in the lists:
.rpwwt-widget ul li div.rpwwt-post-author

All post categories in the lists:
.rpwwt-widget ul li div.rpwwt-post-categories

All post dates in the lists:
.rpwwt-widget ul li div.rpwwt-post-date

All post excerpts in the lists:
.rpwwt-widget ul li div.rpwwt-post-excerpt

All numbers of comments in the lists:
.rpwwt-widget ul li div.rpwwt-post-comments-number

Languages

The user interface is available in

• Arabic (العربية), kindly drawn up by Shadi AlZard
• English
• German (Deutsch)
• Greek (Ελληνικά), kindly drawn up by Kostas Arvanitidis
• Japanese (日本語), kindly drawn up by Kazuyuki Kumai
• Persian (فارسی), kindly drawn up by Sajjad Panahi
• Polish (Polski), kindly drawn up by Marcin Mikolajczyk
• Russian (ру́сский), kindly drawn up by dmitriynn
• Spanish (Español)
• Turkish (Türkçe), kindly drawn up by Mehmet HAKAN

Further translations are welcome. If you want to give in your translation please leave a notice in the plugin’s support forum.