Get it All
Together

The WP folks are announcing the latest version of WordPress will be released some time later this month.  Granted, there’s not a lot left in the month and they’re only just beta testing now, but nevertheless they plan on releasing this month.  The new features are exciting to contemplate, but especially helpful to us developers is the new Widget schema:

via Version 2.8 « WordPress Codex.

WP_Widget is a class that abstracts away much of the complexity involved in writing a widget, especially multi-widgets.

They’ve basically created a new class from which all new plugin widgets can be produced.  This is, as noted, especially helpful when you want to have more than one instance of the plugin on the page at any one time.  The process for this has previously been laborious enough that I haven’t bothered to write any such thing into any of my plugins.  Of course, such labor-intensive duplication is silly when you use a language capable of near-OOP programming and apparently the powers that be WordPress now agree.

This plugin no longer supported by the developer.

Download Here

The WPMU Site-Wide Latest plugin provides two widgets for your site. The first, labeled “Newest Post,” creates an 80-word teaser of the single most recently published blog post on any public blog across the entire site. The second, called “Recent Posts,” creates a list of the most recently updated blogs with their most recent posts, one post per blog. Both plugins provide a vehicle for those using the standard Gravatar plugin to obtain and display the Gravatar of the post author in each case.

The teaser widget takes the post title as the title of the widget, whereas the listing widget allows you to set your own title. Both allow you to ignore blogs, if you wish. The list widget also allows you to specify how many blogs you want to display and an offset. This is in case you use both together, that way the most recent comment is in the “Newest Post” widget and the next most recent begins the list in the “Recent Posts” widget.

The plugin also uses the WP-Cache, and both widgets allow you to set a time-out.

WP-Functions Used in This Plugin:

switch_to_blog()
restore_blog()
wp_cache_set()
wp_cache_get()
get_permalink()

Installation:

Unzip, upload (to either /mu-plugins or /plugins, your preference), activate and configure. Simple as that!