
Random Post for Widget Security & Risk Analysis
wordpress.org/plugins/random-post-for-widgetThis simple plugin is a widget that displays a list of random posts on your sidebar. You can exclude certain posts by ID.
Is Random Post for Widget Safe to Use in 2026?
Generally Safe
Score 85/100Random Post for Widget has no known CVEs and is actively maintained. It's a solid choice for most WordPress installations.
The 'random-post-for-widget' plugin version 5.0 exhibits a concerning security posture despite a lack of recorded historical vulnerabilities or complex taint flows. The static analysis reveals a significant weakness: all 16 output instances are not properly escaped. This is a critical oversight that can lead to Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities, allowing attackers to inject malicious scripts into the website's frontend, potentially compromising user sessions or defacing the site. Additionally, the presence of the `create_function` function is a code smell, as it's considered deprecated and potentially insecure, though its specific impact here isn't immediately clear without further context. The complete absence of capability checks and nonce checks, coupled with zero AJAX handlers and REST API routes that might require such protections, suggests a very limited attack surface, which is positive. However, the unescaped output represents a direct and exploitable risk that outweighs the otherwise clean technical indicators.
Key Concerns
- Unescaped output found
- Dangerous function used (create_function)
- Missing nonce checks
- Missing capability checks
Random Post for Widget Security Vulnerabilities
Random Post for Widget Code Analysis
Dangerous Functions Found
Output Escaping
Random Post for Widget Attack Surface
WordPress Hooks 1
Maintenance & Trust
Random Post for Widget Maintenance & Trust
Maintenance Signals
Community Trust
Random Post for Widget Alternatives
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advanced-random-posts-widget
Provides flexible and advanced random posts. Display it via shortcode or widget with thumbnails, post excerpt, and much more!
Smart Recent Posts Widget
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Provides advanced recent posts widget,you can display it with thumbnails, excerpt, date, author, comment count and more.
Random Posts and Pages Widget
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The main advantage of this widget is random movement of random links and every time they are changing.
Random Posts
random-posts-plugin
Displays a list of random posts.
Advanced Random Posts
advanced-random-posts
Display random posts from selected categories or current category or all posts with thumbnail images (optional).
Random Post for Widget Developer Profile
3 plugins · 2K total installs
How We Detect Random Post for Widget
Patterns used to identify this plugin on WordPress sites during automated security audits and web crawling.
Asset Fingerprints
/wp-content/plugins/random-post-for-widget/random_post_widget.phpHTML / DOM Fingerprints
RandomPostForWidgetid="RandomPostForWidget"name="RandomPostForWidget"