How to increase the number of recent comments in WordPress
If you have direct access to your database you can change the number of recent comments that are displayed on your homepage in WordPress. I use phpMyAdmin to manage my database. Here’s what you need to do:
- Go to the wp_options table in your database
- Browse the data in this table and find the option with the name ‘widget_recent_comments’
- Edit this option and change the last number (it should be ‘5′ by default) to the number of recent comments you would like to display:
a:2:{s:5:"title";s:0:"";s:6:"number";i:5;}
Of course, it’s quite likely that there is a setting for this in the admin panel that I’ve overlooked - I was unable to find it.

January 22nd, 2008 at 4:39 pm
I just edit the recent-comments ‘widget’ under ‘presentation’ in my wordpress menu…
-d-
January 22nd, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Damn! I never noticed that you could click on the graphic to the right to adjust the settings.
Perhaps this post can go down as the Rube Goldberg way of adjusting your settings.
How about connecting to your database via SSH and using mysql to edit the line by way of
UPDATE `wp_options` SET `option_value` = 'a:2:{s:5:"title";s:0:"";s:6:"number";i:10;}' WHERE `option_name` = 'widget_recent_comments'. Or perhaps using only ball bearings and elastic bands to make the change?January 22nd, 2008 at 9:31 pm
hooray for me!
Seriously, I only know VERY basic HTML tags, and only survive by cut/paste…
Your over-looking the more simple way was probably a case of not seeing the ‘forest for the trees’ (as we ALL do from time to time!)…