This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Advanced Random Posts Widget

Description

Notice

This plugin is no longer supported, please use Recent posts widget Extended instead.

This plugin will enable a custom, flexible and advanced random posts. It allows you to display a list of random posts via shortcode or widget with thumbnail, excerpt and post date, also you can display it from all or specific or multiple taxonomy.

Features Include

  • Allow you to set title url.
  • Display thumbnails, with customizable size and alignment.
  • Display excerpt, with customizable length.
  • Display from all, specific or multiple category.
  • Display from all, specific or multiple tag.
  • Display from all, specific or multiple taxonomy.
  • Display post date.
  • Display post modified date.
  • Post types.
  • Post status.
  • Allow you to set custom css class per widget.
  • Add custom html or text before and/or after random posts.
  • Multiple widgets.

Support Me

Shorcode Explanation

Explanation of shortcode options:

Basic shortcode

[arpw]

Display 10 random posts

[arpw limit="10"]

Display with thumbnail and set the size

[arpw thumbnail="true" thumbnail_size="arpw-thumbnail"]

Display posts based on category by id

[arpw thumbnail="true" cat="10"]

Display portfolio post type

[arpw post_type="portfolio"]

Here’s the full default shortcode arguments

title=""
offset=""
limit="5"
post_type="post"
post_status="publish"
ignore_sticky="1"
taxonomy=""
cat=""
tag=""
thumbnail="false"
thumbnail_size="arpw-thumbnail"
thumbnail_align="left"
excerpt="false"
excerpt_length="10"
date="false"
date_modified="false"
date_relative="false"
css_class=""
before=""
after=""

Screenshots

  • The widget settings

Installation

Through Dashboard

  1. Log in to your WordPress admin panel and go to Plugins -> Add New
  2. Type advanced random posts widget in the search box and click on search button.
  3. Find Advanced Random Posts Widget plugin.
  4. Then click on Install Now after that activate the plugin.
  5. Go to the widgets page Appearance -> Widgets.
  6. Find Random Posts widget.

Installing Via FTP

  1. Download the plugin to your hardisk.
  2. Unzip.
  3. Upload the advanced-random-posts-widget folder into your plugins directory.
  4. Log in to your WordPress admin panel and click the Plugins menu.
  5. Then activate the plugin.
  6. Go to the widgets page Appearance -> Widgets.
  7. Find Random Posts widget.

FAQ

No image/thumbnail options?

Your theme needs to support Post Thumbnail, please go to https://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Thumbnails to read more info and how to activate it in your theme.

Thumbnail Size

By default it uses arpw-thumbnail which have 50×50 size. If you want to use custom image size, you can install https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-image-sizes/ then create new image size, it will appear in the Thumbnail Size selectbox in the widget option.

Thumbnail Size Not Working Properly

I have mentioned it in the plugin description. If you use images that were uploaded to the media library before you installed this plugin and/or you have your own custom image sizes, please install Regenerate Thumbnails plugin to fix the image size.

How to add custom style?

The plugin comes with a very basic style, if you want to add custom style please do wp_dequeue_style to remove the default stylesheet. Place the code below in your theme functions.php.

function prefix_remove_arpw_style() {
    wp_dequeue_style( 'arpw-style' );
}
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'prefix_remove_arpw_style', 10 );

Then you can add your custom style using Custom CSS plugin or in your theme style.css. Here’s the plugin selector

/* ul */
.arpw-ul {}

/* li */
.arpw-li {}

/* title */
.arpw-title {}

/* thumbnail */
.arpw-thumbnail {}

/* date */
.arpw-time {}

/* excerpt */
.arpw-summary {}

Reviews

June 10, 2022
this is a great useful plugin but need to be updated!
June 10, 2021
This plug-in works so well it hasn't needed any updates for 2 years. Nothing out there matches it. However, because it hasn't been updated in so long my security software is now flagging it as "abandoned." Please "update" the plug-in! (Maybe to include not stripping formatting from the excerpt?)
April 28, 2021
This plugin is really excellent. It works for me with Wordpress 5.7. I would be nice that the Developer makes a test and declare the plugin compabible (or not) for the last version of wordpress.
November 19, 2020
In the beginning this plugin was great, but several months ago, the developer has abandoned it. No answers in the support forum, and not updates. Best regards.
Read all 39 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Advanced Random Posts Widget” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

“Advanced Random Posts Widget” has been translated into 2 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “Advanced Random Posts Widget” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

2.2.0 – March 07, 2019

  • Support WordPress 5.1
  • Added: Display full post. props Rhys Wynne
  • Added: width and height attribute if using custom image size