WP Latest Post Blogroll

WP Latest Post Blogroll is a WordPress Plugin that augments the traditional blogroll with the latest post topics found at the specified blog addresses listed in the blogroll. A link to the latest post at each of the blogs appears in the blogroll instead of the name of the blog.

Download the WP Latest Post Blogroll plugin at the WP Plugins Directory.

The source of WP Latest Post Blogroll plugin is a simplified adaptation of Vladimir Prelovac’s Live Blogroll plugin. He uses JavaScript and AJAX to call up the RSS feed of each site on the blogroll and capture the last few posts, their titles, posted dates and a fragment of the post content. This information is supposed to be presented in a pop up window when the user hovers their mouse pointer over a blog title in the blogroll. Unfortunately, some parameter of the Live Blogroll plugin keeps it from working properly with WordPress version 3.0 or greater, at least at the time of this writing.

By taking out the JavaScript and AJAX calls the plugin can be reduced to a single PHP file that shows the title of the last post for each site listed in the blogroll. If a site’s RSS feed cannot be found, then the title of the blog is listed instead. Taking away the interactivity of the blogroll leaves a simple, yet embellished, view of our favorite sites as listed in the blogroll.

The code was further updated to use the object-friendly fetch_feed function in order to replace the deprecated fetch_rss function.

Here’s the basic code for the WP Latest Post Blogroll:

Credit and thanks go out to Vladimir for showing us how to breathe life into our blogrolls.

WP Latest Post Blogroll can be used where ever you have your blogroll.

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