Recent comments

Recent comments in your own markup

Added in the 0.2.0 Beta release; not included in 0.1.1.

Use commentail_recent for a sidebar, home page or another list outside the discussion widget. It returns presentation dictionaries for your template and requires no Commentail CSS or JavaScript.

{% load commentail_tags %}
{% commentail_recent limit=5 as recent_comments %}

<ul>
  {% for comment in recent_comments %}
    <li>
      <a href="{{ comment.url }}">
        {{ comment.author_name }}: {{ comment.text|truncatechars:120 }}
      </a>
      — {{ comment.target_title }}
      <time datetime="{{ comment.published_at|date:'c' }}">
        {{ comment.published_at|date:'SHORT_DATETIME_FORMAT' }}
      </time>
    </li>
  {% empty %}
    <li>No comments yet.</li>
  {% endfor %}
</ul>

Filters and ordering

Argument	Default	Behavior
limit	5	Nonnegative integer; 0 returns an empty list
page	Omitted	Exact saved Wagtail Page; does not include descendants
include_replies	True	False selects only root comments

{% commentail_recent limit=3 page=page include_replies=False as recent_comments %}

Arguments may also be template variables. Use integers and booleans, rather than strings such as limit="5" or include_replies="False". Invalid limit/boolean values raise TemplateSyntaxError. An invalid or unsaved Page returns no rows.

Without page, the selection includes Wagtail Pages and registered Django objects on the request's current Wagtail Site. With page, it includes only that Page. Comments are sorted by publication time, newest first, with descending comment ID breaking ties. The limit counts accessible results, after visibility checks; inaccessible recent comments do not displace older accessible ones.

Only published comments with a non-null publication time at or before the current time are eligible. Pending, rejected, hidden and deleted messages are excluded, including the visitor's own pending messages. Read-only discussions remain eligible; effective hidden discussions do not. Replies to hidden/deleted roots remain eligible when the replies themselves are published, as in the standard discussion widget.

Returned fields

Each dictionary contains exactly these fields:

Field	Value
id	Integer comment ID
author_name	Current display name, including the existing GET_AUTHOR_NAME hook
text	Published plain text, without generated links or HTML
published_at	Publication datetime
target_title	Page title, or str(obj) for an adapted object
url	Comment permalink, including navigation to a reply outside the first batch

No email, moderation reason, tokens, user, discussion or target model is returned. Keep Django autoescaping enabled; do not apply safe to comment text or names. Truncation, dates, empty-state wording and HTML belong to your template.

Access, caching and integration

The context must contain request, normally supplied by Django's request context processor. Without a request or a resolved Wagtail Site the tag returns an empty list. Selection does not create discussions, forms or guest proofs.

Page comments require a live Page within the Site root, the current visitor's access (including inherited restrictions), and a template containing the regular {% commentail page %} widget. The recent-comments tag alone does not enable a Page discussion. Object comments use the registered adapter's current Site and can_view checks; unavailable targets and adapter access failures are excluded. The existing permalink fallback applies if an object's URL adapter fails.

Results depend on the visitor. Keep CapabilityHeadersMiddleware installed as described in Installation; rendering this tag marks the response Cache-Control: private, no-store. Do not put the list in a shared template-fragment cache or override these headers with a public page/CDN cache.

The selector reads bounded SQL batches and reuses each discussion's access decision and URL within one selection. Page types and ordinary restrictions are loaded in batches. It may inspect more than limit candidates to fill the list, so many inaccessible discussions can make a global selection expensive. It does not cache permissions across requests. There is no popularity ranking or polling. See Performance for indexes, query costs and reproducible load checks.

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