A lot of the text is in french, it's not that big a deal -- just open up the files in a text editor and translate. This literally shows the last new topics, not the most recent posts, which confused me at first.

There are some nice configuration options for limiting the size of the output, how many topics to show, you can turn authors, posts, etc on and off. This makes it easy to integrate it into an existing site, and you can always edit the mod_lasttopics.php file to change the output to your liking.

I modified my install so that it shows the most recent posts, rather than the newest topics. It's very easy to change, all you have to do is open up mod_lasttopics.php and look for the line:

$db = new database($hostname, $name, $pass, $datbase, $prefix);

On the next line, change $selection to:
$selection = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM $pref ORDER BY `topic_last_post_id` DESC ");


Not a bad mod, and goes nicely with a bridge to draw people into the forums from the main page. Easy to modify.

This mod, while useful, is written so that it is returning 50 thousand rows. If you have a joomla site that gets a reasonable amount of traffic, this module will create a serious load on your mysql and your server.

This is a simple module, and very easy to set up. Just 2 things to note:
1) some of the text is in French, and there doesn't seem to be a simple way to edit that, and
2) it asks for your forum db info, and stores the password on the admin page in plaintext... that could be a security hazard to some.