We’ve been using WP-RecentComments plugin for a long time (despite it not have been updated for 2+ years), but since WP has upgrade to 4.2.4, it’s been de-activating itself every five minutes – literately – so Reader’s comment not appear on the home page. This has led to a drop in commenting.

I looked around the WordPress ‘Show recent comments’ plugin world and amazingly there wasn’t much around. There’s a brief review of what’s available below.

WP Tab Widget was my first choice as it used AJAX to load the comment (keeping page load times as short as possible), but I found that it gave a “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error”, which I’d never see in WordPress before. I’ve put a report in about it to see if it can be resolved.

As a stand-in I installed the ‘Decent Comments‘ plugin which has worked very efficiently, loading pages quickly each time. Only thing is that it’s styling isn’t great. This might be alterable with attention.

Quick review of available show recent comments plugins

WP Tab Widget
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-tab-widget/screenshots/
Looks perfect
AJAX loading of comments
Crashes on Activations

Decent Comments
Last Updated: 3 months ago
Don’t think it’s AJAX

Better WordPress Recent Comments
Not updated for Two years

Popular Widget
Perhaps not AJAX
Not updated for 10 month
Display looks old fashioned