Modified Version Recently Updated Posts

During the upgrade to 2.3.1 several plug-ins I was using stop working. One was Show Category Posts which I was using to display information on recent blog posts on my non-blog homepage.

See related posts:
topic 148851
topic 148850
topic 148761

I found a working method to accomplish what I am trying to do and decided to put up a separate thread to share it as opposed to putting in each of the above.

First off, there was a good suggestion to just do this:

<?php wp_get_archives("type=postbypost&limit=20"); ?>

Note: remember to put

<?php
/* Don't remove this line. */
require('./blog/wp-blog-header.php');
?>

at the top of your non-blog page.

This will return a list of recent posts and works fine just by inserting this in your non-blog page. However, it returns only the post_title as a link. In my case I wanted the post_title, post_date and post_excerpt to display.

The easiest way I found to get this information out is to modify a plug-in that works for 2.3.1. It is Recently Updated Posts. In it’s existing form it returns only a list of posts based on last mod date, I tweaked it to return the post, date, and excerpt and sort it on post date (as opposed to modified date).

Here is what I changed:

The foreach loop, changed to format date, and return date/excerpt:

foreach($posts as $p) {
		$title_ = str_replace('-', '- ', $p->post_title);

                $tdYYYY = substr($p->post_date,0,4);
                $tdMM = substr($p->post_date,5,2);
                $tdDD = substr($p->post_date,8,2);
                $ttHH = substr($p->post_date,11,2);
                $ttMM = substr($p->post_date,14,2);
                $ttSS = substr($p->post_date,17,2);
                $tfmtdatetime = date('d-M-Y', mktime($ttHH, $ttMM, $ttSS, $tdMM, $tdDD, $tdYYYY));
		print '<li>'.'<a href="'.get_permalink($p->ID).'" title="'.htmlentities($p->post_title).'">'.$title_.'</a>' . ' - ' . $tfmtdatetime . '</li>';
                print '<li>' . '  ' . $p->post_excerpt . '</li>';
	}

SQL select statement: I changed to select all the data fields (SELECT *) and to sort by post_date_gmt.

$sql = "SELECT * FROM'{$wpdb->posts}'"
		. " WHERE 'post_status' = 'publish'"
		. " AND 'post_modified_gmt' != '0000-00-00 00:00:00'"
		. ($includePages
			? " AND ('post_type' = 'post' OR <code>post_type</code> = 'page')"
			: " AND 'post_type' = 'post'")
		. ($hideProtectedPosts
			? " AND 'post_password' = ''" : '')
		. " AND 'post_modified_gmt' < '{$now}'"
		. " ORDER BY 'post_date_gmt' DESC"
		. " LIMIT {$skip}, {$no_posts}";

I found this plugin was quite small and easy to tweak.