If you'd like to display your most recent blog posts, but you want to do it by displaying your last week's posts, you can do so with the help of a WordPress plugin. Yes, this can be coded into our WordPress website, but it's much easier to use a plugin for beginners. 

In this WordPress tutorial, we will show you how to use the recent posts widget extended plugin to let you show different sets of recent posts on your WordPress blog.

<h2>The Recent Posts Widget Extended Plugin</h2>

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/RecentPostsWidgetExtended.png" alt="Recent Posts Widget Extended" width="576" height="256" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-7132" />

The first major updated to this plugin is on the way and will bring even more power to it. Currently, you can use the plugin with WordPress version 3.6 and higher. It will allow you to display your posts by date, comment count, random or use shortcodes to display them in other ways. 

Along with deciding how you want to display your posts, you can use thumbnails, customize the length, use specific categories, display by tag, use custom CSS and use multiple widgets. This will make it easy to show your posts how you prefer.

Start by downloading, installing and activating the <a href="http://wordpress.org/plugins/recent-posts-widget-extended/">Recent Posts Widget Extended plugin</a>. Once installed, you can access this plugin by going to <strong>Appearance &gt;&gt; Widgets</strong>

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Widget.png" alt="Widget" width="222" height="129" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-7133" />

Now, you can use the widget to place your posts on your website however you'd like. This widget gives you plenty of options to work with and will allow you to show last week's posts. 

The top areas will allow you to add a title to your widget, a title URL, limited the amount of posts and set an offset.

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/TitleAndLimit.png" alt="Title And Limit" width="560" height="191" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-7134" />

The middle section will allow you to adjust which posts display. You can use the orderby to change to a specific date, comment count, menu order and other options. You can also use the limited to category option to limit the display to specific categories. You can do the same with the limit to tags section and you can even choose the post type.

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/OrderBy.png" alt="OrderBy" width="278" height="366" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-7135" />

The far right section will allow you to change the thumbnail image, display an excerpt, change the thumbnail size, choose the length of the excerpt and adjust other display options for your widget. 

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Display.png" alt="Display" width="282" height="392" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-7136" />

Now you can use this plugin to display your last week's posts or display your posts in any other way you desire. It allows you to use it more than once on the same site, so you can customize your widget areas to display your blog posts however you'd like.
