WordPress 'Recent Posts' Script

I’m looking for a script that will display the three most recent posts (with an offset of 1) , and will present posts in the following format;

• Post title
• Post meta/info (date/time, posted by, categories)
• Post excerpt (i.e. 50 - 100 words, probably using the ‘post excerpt’ function built-in by WordPress).

And here’s some history that will prove relevant to finding the solution;

I have a ‘working example’ of this script on my own blog, neilcauldwell.com. You’ll see that the dark footer area has a ‘Recent Posts’ section, and it does everything I described above.

However, I recently decided to auction-off an old blog theme in favor of OLPC (unfortunately it ended-up going for GBP 2.20! You’ve got to laugh!) and this theme needs to use the same ‘Recent Posts’ script for it’s own dark footer area. Here is a link to this theme;

http://enterprise.neilcauldwell.com/

But, neilcauldwell.com uses a modified version of the official WordPress ‘dynamic sidebar widgets’ plugin, and this has since been deprecated in WordPress, and has now been built right into the core of the blogging platform. This means that I can’t use the script that I’m using on neilcauldwell.com on the new blog theme, because new WordPress installations simply don’t support the sidebar widgets plugin.

I’ve looked into alternative ‘Recent Posts’ scripts, and have tried the following, and had issues with each;

1. Custom code from a web dev forum member:

Problem: The above code does everything I want it to do, but for some bizarre reason, it will only pull the excerpt from the latest post, which means that all the ‘Recent Posts’ in the will have the wrong ‘post_excerpt’. For example, take a look at this link http://enterprise.neilcauldwell.com/ ; all the post excerpts in the ‘Recent Posts’ section are just the post excerpt which should be taken from the latest post, i.e. the one that starts with ‘Business models lorem ipsum dolor…’. Why are the post excerpts not being taken from the respective posts?

1. MDV recent posts plugin:

http://mtdewvirus.com/code/wordpress-plugins/

A forum member tried to get this working for me, but I just couldn’t get the script to display more than the post title - so it just didn’t do the job.

1. Coffee2Code recent posts plugin:

http://www.coffee2code.com/archives/2004/08/27/plugin-customizable-post-listings/

I could get this one to display the post excerpt, but it also suffered from the problem of only displaying the excerpt from the latest post….

So, I’ve tried many routes to fixing this, but no luck so far. If anyone out there knows how to get a standalone ‘Recent Posts’ script working with WordPress (as described above), it will be very much appreciated!