Elevate your website’s community engagement by bringing your most active discussions directly into your sidebars, footers, and other widget-ready areas. The wpDiscuz – Widgets plugin acts as a powerful extension for the core wpDiscuz comment system, transforming static comment sections into dynamic, interactive content hubs. By surfacing recent discussions, top contributors, and trending topics, you keep visitors engaged longer and encourage them to participate in the conversations that matter most to your brand.
Key Features
- Recent Comments Widget: Display a customizable list of the latest comments across your entire site. You can choose to show the commenter’s avatar, the comment excerpt, and the post title to provide context and encourage click-throughs.
- Top Commenters Widget: Gamify your community by highlighting your most active participants. This feature automatically tracks and displays users who contribute the most, fostering a sense of community and encouraging healthy competition among your readers.
- Trending Discussions Widget: Automatically surface the most popular or highly commented-on posts. This ensures that new visitors immediately see the most valuable and active conversations, helping them integrate into your community faster.
- Advanced Filtering and Customization: Control exactly what appears in your widgets. Filter by post type, exclude specific categories, limit the number of comments displayed, and adjust character lengths for excerpts to ensure your site layout remains clean and professional.
- Seamless Integration: Designed specifically for the wpDiscuz ecosystem, these widgets inherit the styling and performance optimizations of the core plugin, ensuring a consistent look and feel without requiring custom CSS or complex configuration.
- Responsive Design: All widgets are built to be fully responsive, ensuring that your community engagement tools look great and function perfectly on mobile devices, tablets, and desktops alike.
Use Cases / Who It’s For
This plugin is essential for any website owner who prioritizes community building and user retention. If you run a blog, news site, or educational platform where comments are a primary source of value, wpDiscuz – Widgets is the perfect tool to maximize that value.
For bloggers, it helps keep older, high-value posts relevant by pulling their comments into the sidebar. For news outlets, it provides a live feed of public opinion, keeping the site feeling fresh and active. For community managers, the Top Commenters feature is an excellent way to identify and reward power users, which is a proven strategy for increasing long-term loyalty and site traffic. Whether you are looking to increase page views, reduce bounce rates, or foster a more vibrant community, these widgets provide the necessary visibility to turn passive readers into active participants.
Setup / How It Works
Getting started with wpDiscuz – Widgets is straightforward, as it is designed to work natively with the WordPress widget system you are already familiar with.
- Install and Activate: Once you have the core wpDiscuz plugin installed, install and activate the wpDiscuz – Widgets add-on.
- Navigate to Widgets: Go to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Appearance, then select Widgets.
- Drag and Drop: You will see new widget blocks available, such as “wpDiscuz Recent Comments” or “wpDiscuz Top Commenters.” Simply drag these into your desired sidebar, footer, or other widget area.
- Configure Settings: Each widget block includes a settings panel where you can define the number of items to show, whether to display avatars, and which post types to include or exclude.
- Save and Preview: Click save, and your interactive comment widgets will immediately appear on your site, ready to drive engagement and highlight your community’s voice.