NC Thumbnails for Recents Posts

Problem: the default latest posts WordPress widget doesn’t allow the featured image to display alongside it. It also doesn’t allow you to display the latest posts from another post type.

There are plugins out there that allow you to display a thumbnail, but they create additional image file sizes of every image you upload and this adds bloat to your hosting file size quota.

My solution: My plugin uses the thumbnail files already generated and allows you to display the latest posts from a custom post type other than post. It also includes the standard options to show the date.

Extending and customizing

My plugin is also extendable with the following action hooks nc_thumbnail_recent_posts_widget_before and nc_thumbnail_recent_posts_widget_after. You can add something before and after the title of the latest posts. Here’s some example code you would place in your functions.php file:

function your_custom_function() {
   echo'add your content here'; 
} 
add_action('nc_thumbnail_recent_posts_widget_after', 'your_custom_function');

You can customize the layout with CSS custom properties. View the browser inspector to learn more. Here’s an example of what you can do:

#megafooter .nctrpsw {
    --image-gap: .75em;
    --image-border: none;
    --image-width: 95px;
    --image-height: 60px;
}