Get Recent Comments

This plugin shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your sidebar. You have comprehensive control about their appearance. This ranges from the number of comments, the length of the excerpts up to the html layout. You can let the plugin order the comments by the corresponding post, or simply order them by date. The plugin can (optionally) separate the trackbacks/pingbacks from the comments. It can ignore comments to certain categories, and it offers support for gravatars. It only gives extra work to the database, when actually a new comment arrived. You can filter out unwanted pingbacks, which originate from your own blog. And it is a widget.

Installation:

1. Upload get-recent-comments.php to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
2. Activate Get Recent Comments through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress.
3. What to do now depends on how up to date your theme is:
   Modern theme with widget support
   The plugin is a widget. If your theme supports widgets, and you have installed the widget plugin, adding the plugin to the sidebar is easy: Go to the presentation menu and drag and drop the widget into the sidebar (Screenshot). Don't forget the Get Recent Trackbacks box. And you might want to change the title. All done.
   Old school theme without widget support
   You need to insert the following code snippet into the sidebar template.

wp-content/themes//sidebar.php

<?php if (function_exists('get_recent_comments')) { ?>
<li><h2><?php _e('Recent Comments:'); ?></h2>
      <ul>
      <?php get_recent_comments(); ?>
      </ul>
</li>
<?php } ?>  

<?php if (function_exists('get_recent_trackbacks')) { ?>
<li><h2><?php _e('Recent Trackbacks:'); ?></h2>
      <ul>
      <?php get_recent_trackbacks(); ?>
      </ul>
</li>
<?php } ?>