This is great! Thanks Simon. Been looking for a way to embed a few latest posts in Wordpress.
Our use case for this: we’re building a membership site and would like to have a list on our main member dashboard that links to a few Discourse discussions members would be most likely to enjoy.
One suggestion: it might be useful to have a [discourse_top] shortcode that works basically the same way as [discourse_latest]. I imagine it would take same params + a “range” option to specify “today” / “week” / “month” / etc.
I’m thinking “top” topics might be more likely to spark engagement than “newest”. Though may be cool to display both, actually 
PS — just saw your new “WP Discourse Latest Topics” plugin linked in the WP Discourse 1.2.5 announcement. It seems that’s basically a single feature extracted from this shortcodes plugin, as a demo/test of some sort? For using [discourse_latest] should we stick to using the shortcodes plugin for now?