Display posts from a set of tags in the sidebar

Recently I was looking for ways to display posts from a specific set of tags in the sidebar.

I preferred a sidebar widget rather than making changes directly to the theme files, because if I am using a widget I don’t need to remember to make the change again when choosing a different theme.

A quick search didn’t yield any results which made me to write my own Plugin and thus the Posts By Tag WordPress Plugin was born.

Features

Posts By Tag Plugin provides a sidebar widget (using the new Widget API provided in WordPress 2.8) which can be configured to display posts from a set of tags in the sidebar. You can have multiple widgets with different set of tags configured for each one of them.

Each widget allows you to choose

  • The set of tags whose posts should be displayed
  • The number of posts to be displayed.
  • Option to enable post excerpts to be displayed with post titles.
  • Option to display post thumbnail if present.

Caching

The Plugins caches the posts of each widget separately, and issues database queries only when needed. This will reduce the amount of database queries involved for each page load and will therefore be light on your server.

Screenshot

Tag Posts Widget Settings

Download

You can download the Plugin from the Plugin’s home page. After downloading the zip file, extract it and upload the contents to the wp-content directory. Activate the Plugin from the Plugins page and you should see a new widget called “Tag Posts” in the widgets pages.

Feedback

As usual try out the Plugin and do let me know if you have any feedback, queries or comments.

PS: I am using the built-in tags auto-complete script used in the Write Post page. I will write a separate post explaining how to integrate tags auto-complete script in your Plugins.

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