Popularity Contest Plugin (beta)

Popularity Contest is a WordPress plugin that uses page views and feedback (comments, trackbacks, etc.) to determine how popular each of your posts are (in relation to each other). The values given to each type of view and feedback are configurable1 and popularity for all posts is recalculated whenever they are changed.

Obviously, since views have not been tracked for older posts they are ranked lower than more recent posts will be – however it’s still pretty cool to have the data on a going-forward basis.

The plugin adds a new tab under Options to allow you to configure the values for each view and feedback type. It also adds a new tab under Dashboard to show you the lists of most popular posts (by category, month, etc.).

Popularity Contest is a true drop-in plugin, with no changes required in the template. However there are optional template tags that can be used to show sidebar lists of popular posts2. There is an included sidebar.php (from the default theme) that shows how to use these template tags.

You can now see the output from the plugin here on my site.

I believe the plugin is fully (and properly) localized, however this is my first attempt at using the WP localization tools so if I’ve done it wrong please let me know.

Last month, I was doing some frantic coding to get Popularity Contest written and ready for release within a 2 week window. As it turned out I had 2 months, so I’ve had a chance to test and use the plugin for the last month – so far so good.

I’ve got a beta ready for public testing: Download from my Plugins page

Writing this was also fun for me because I learned a little more SQL (for the reports) that will certainly be useful in the future.

I’ll be getting this added to the plugin competition soon.

Please post bugs and support questions in this forum thread.

  1. I’ll be interested to hear what values people are using. [back]
  2. For example, most popular in this category, month, etc. [back]

This post is part of the thread: Content Presentation – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

This post is part of the following projects: WP Mobile Edition, Popularity Contest. View the project timelines for more context on this post.