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Showing Most Recent members (with pics) and recent posts

I gather this a completly newbie question, so apologies in advance.

I have installed WPMU along with the edu-clean theme and the sitewide avatars. So far so good. It’s looking great!

I want to add two sections to the home page:

1. A list of X most recent members, which includes their name and profile pic (avatar) at a minimum

2. A list of Y most recent blog posts, which includes the member picture and name and like a 2 line extract of the blog entry which hyperlinks to the blog.

I got confused since I see there is a RSS feed apparantly built into WPMU (thats how much of newbie I am) but I have no idea how to activate that or even if that is the right way to go. Or should I be using a plug-in.

I don’t mind editing the theme PHP files, I just dont now where to get the info for 1. and 2. above from.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction,

Sun, 8 Feb 2009 18:45:33
  • drmike
    • DEV MAN’s Mascot

    A list of X most recent members

    In all honesty, why? I know on most of our installs, these are either spammers we haven’t caught yet, new users who haven’t uploaded a pic yet or are just trying out the service, or new users who just signed up to make a comment on a restricted blog.

    I don’t mind answering but you may want to reconsider what you;re trying to do here.

    A list of Y most recent blog posts

    Well if you;re using one of the sitewide solutions, I’d be just importing it into blog #1 and display the list using the code from the latest posts widget or the example of latest posts in the home/home.php file from the download. I;d have to site there and work out the avatars though. I believe this has been discussed a few times previously. Really depends on how you would be grabbing your latest posts list though.

    Sorry I’m not giving you the answers you want.

  • cdutoit
    • WPMU DEV Initiate

    Actually, in retrospect, your caution on the registered users makes sense.

    I have had some luck now with the sitewide multi plug-in. I feel comfortable enough to change the code to take the most recent posts (I think….famous last words).

    However, my question then is: How do I manually insert this ‘widget’ in the edu-clean home page? It shows up as a sidebar widget on inner pages, but how I can I physically stick it somewhere on a page?

    Thanks

  • drmike
    • DEV MAN’s Mascot

    I haven’t tried the theme myself so I can’t answer.

    One thing that I can suggest since I have an install testing the idea now is using that point system plugin we discussed a few weeks back on the mu forums, run through that every few hours and cache the user data in a separate table. Do that, grab a dozen users, randomize the order and use that for your Users list.

    I’ll add that idea to my article list over at Andrea’s site since you can also do it with Gravatar. Someone’s taking me to do laundry tonight. It’s been a while.

    edit: Tomorrow’s looking at be a documentation/ writing day anyway.

  • cdutoit
    • WPMU DEV Initiate

    Hi –

    I hacked together a solution it seems.

    It takes the most recent blogs, and of those, the most recent post, and displays it along with the user pic. It also filters the first default “hello world” post so you dont see hundereds of those.

    Work in progress but you can see it here: jurnl.com – scroll down to the bottom, you’ll see it in blue block.

    Thanks for the suggestions.

    Chris

  • cdutoit
    • WPMU DEV Initiate

    Shafi –

    Let me know if you still need the code – I had problems with the plug-in but maybe it works for you. I am on WpMU 2.7.

    Hopefully Andrea_r’s solution works for you since I’m sure its more elegant.

    Chris

  • drmike
    • DEV MAN’s Mascot

    If you;re using Donnchaq’s sitewide tags solution, would think you can also do a switch_blog over to the tag blog, run the display recent posts function, and then switch back. Save on installing yet another plugin.

    Haven’t tried it so YMMV.