In the past we’ve discussed how to add recent posts to your WordPress blog manually using code, but for blogs that are regularly updating older posts (there are a surprising number of these), here is some code that you can instead use to only show the most recently updated posts in WordPress!

Here is the code you’ll want to place in your sidebar.php file where you want the updated posts to display:

<?php
$today = current_time('mysql', 1);
$howMany = 5; //Number of posts you want to display
if ( $recentposts = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT ID, post_title FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_modified_gmt < '$today' ORDER BY post_modified_gmt DESC LIMIT $howMany")):
?>
<h2><?php _e("Recent Updates"); ?></h2>
<ul>
<?php
foreach ($recentposts as $post) {
if ($post->post_title == '') $post->post_title = sprintf(__('Post #%s'), $post->ID);
echo "<li><a href='".get_permalink($post->ID)."'>";
the_title();
echo '</a></li>';
}
?>
</ul>
<?php endif; ?>