One of the first things that a lot of WordPress MU site owners want to do is to show all the latest posts from across the entire site on the homepage - simply, efficiently and quickly.

Well, if that's what you are after - your search ends here :) This is a simple but powerful widget that runs in conjunction with out Post Indexer (you'll need to drop that into mu-plugins too) and allows you to do just that!

Once in place, the latest posts (since you installed the post indexer) will appear however you wish to style them, simple as that:

After installing you just go Appearance > Widgets and add the Recent Global Posts widget to your sidebar

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And of course its simple to configure in very powerful ways! To display the blog avatars you will need to install the avatars plugin.