Special Recent Posts
online documentation
What is Special Recent Posts?
Special Recent Posts PRO is a very powerful plugin/widget for WordPress which displays your recent posts with thumbnails.
It’s the perfect solution for online magazines or simple blogs and it comes with more than 60+ available customization options.
You can dynamically re-size thumbnails to any desired dimension, drag multiple widget instances and configure each one with specific settings.
The auto-generated PHP code/shortcodes help you to insert any widget instance in any part of your theme.
How Special Recent Posts works
Special Recent Posts basically retrieves a list of recent posts assigning a thumbnail to each entry. The thumbnail generation process is one of the key features that makes SRP “special”. The image re-size process is done completely on-the-fly and generated thumbnails are stored in a special cache folder for later display and less load on server.
For first, SRP tries to fetch a post featured image. If this exists, it's going to be displayed, otherwise the plugin will try to fetch the first image from the post content. If this last step fails too, a custom no-image thumbnail will be displayed.
If you're having troubles with thumbnail display, please read the F.A.Q
Note: Caching is mandatory. This means that if the cache folder doesn't exists or is unwritable, the whole plugin won't work.
Requirements
In order for the SRP plugin to work, these settings are required:
-
Wordpress release 3.0+
-
PHP version 5+
-
GD libraries installed and enabled on your server.
-
Correct permissions (0775 or 0777) on the cache folder under [SRP FOLDER]/cache
Installation
Manual installation is easy and takes fewer than five minutes.
- Download the plugin, unpack it and upload the [SRP FOLDER] to your wp-content/plugins directory.
- Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress.
- Go to Settings > Special Recent Posts (PRO/FREE) Edition to configure the basic options.
- On the widgets panel, drag the Special Recent Posts widget onto one of your sidebars and configure its specific settings.
- You're done. Enjoy.
Configuration
Basic Settings
These settings are available under the Settings->Special Recent Posts (PRO/FREE) Edition panel. This is the main place where global options apply to the whole plugin.
Widget Settings
This is the core of the Special Recent Posts (PRO/FREE) Edition plugin. Here you can configure quite everything about your recent posts.
The widget panel is divided into several sections, where each one take care of different settings.
Notes: In the plugin folder there is a configuration file called srp-config.php.
PLEASE DO NOT MODIFY THIS FILE DIRECTLY.
Using Shortcodes/PHP Code (PRO version only)
This is a great feature that lets users to insert the Special Recent Posts PRO Edition widget in all non-widget handled parts of their Wordpress theme.
Now you don't have to care anymore about manually building your own shortcode or PHP code, because everything is processed and done by the special “CODE GENERATOR” section in the widget panel.
Just follow these steps:
-
Configure your widget settings and hit save.
-
Head to the Code Generator tab and pick up the generated shortcode or php code.
-
Paste the shortcode in a wordpress post/page, or the PHP code in any part of your theme.
F.A.Q
How do i edit the CSS?
The css is located at [SRP FOLDER]/css/css-front.css
Plugin shows no thumbnails.
This issue might be caused by several problems. Please check the following list:
-
Set the correct permissions on the cache folder. In order to generate the thumbnails, the SRP plugin needs to write the cache folder, located under [SRP FOLDER]/cache/ Be sure this folder is set to 0775 or 0777. Please ask to your system administrator if you're not sure what you are doing.
-
Thumbnails are rendered using the PHP GD libraries. These should be enabled on your server. Do a phpinfo() on your host to check if they're installed properly. Contact your hosting support to know how to enable them.
-
Another problem could be that you're hosting the plugin on a MS Windows based machine. This will probably change the encoding data inside the files and could lead to several malfunctions. Better to host on a Unix/Linux based environment.
-
External images are not allowed. This means that if you're trying to generate a thumbnail from an image hosted on a different domain, it won't work.
Category/Post filtering isn't working
In order to properly filter posts by categories, you must provide a numeric value which is the Category ID. Every Wordpress category has an unique IDentification number, and this can be found doing the following steps:
-
Go in the Posts->Categories panel
-
Mouse over a category name.
-
Look at the status bar at the very bottom of your browser window. There you'll find a long string containing a parameter called tag_ID and its following value.
-
Take note of that number, which is the relative Category ID to insert in the SRP filtering panel.
NOTE: Please remember that this procedure is valid for the post filtering process too.
Support & Updates
Any support request must be pushed through the official Help Desk.
To keep in touch and be notified on updates, new releases and general news, please follow Special Recent Posts on: