My Popularity Contest plugin for WordPress has been “broken”1 for more than a year (since the WordPress 2.5 release I believe). Luckily, the great WordPress community found and posted work-arounds and most people had working versions while updating the plugin sat on my to-do list.
The main issue with updating it was that I felt that the old implementation was somewhat broken. It didn’t work with caching, it didn’t handle tags and other new features introduced in recent versions of WordPress. In short, it needed a rewrite. And that is what it got in version 2.0.
- This version is completely cache compatible. It uses JavaScript and image loading techniques to do the view counting. It also has a nice widget options for showing various reports on the front-end.
- There is now an option to exclude views from site authors, which was a commonly requested feature.
- The back-end reports have been redone a bit, and tag reports still need to be added. Those will take a little more work to implement properly.
- We also updated the code to use more official WordPress API functions (many of which didn’t exist when this plugin was originally created).
It’s been a good deal of work getting it all updated and ready for release, but hopefully this version will work better than ever for everyone.
This is a beta release because it hasn’t had widespread testing (yet). Your feedback is requested – please let me know if you run into issues. Posting issues in the comments here is ok for this one. 🙂
The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.
If you have any general trouble with this, please contact the WordPress HelpCenter or you can try the WP Support Forums.
- Did not work on versions of WordPress greater than 2.3. [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 project: Popularity Contest. View the project timeline for more context on this post.