A new beta of my Popularity Contest plugin for WordPress is available – this has some minor bug fixes and some new features and nicer handling of some edge cases. Since this version is the best known version, I have made it the default download at WordPress.org’s plugin hosting.

Changes since beta 1:

• Added tag reports. I’m pretty pleased at how these work – you type in the name of a tag you want a report on, it will auto-complete just like in the tags form on the New Post page, and then bring back the tag report when you hit Add.
• Added nice re-flowing code so that reports take up all available horizontal space when displaying.
• Added some additional refinements to the overall Popularity list at the top of the reports page.
• Added a Last (n) Days option to the widget (you can configure the # of days for the widget).
• Removed tags from category reports list.
• Fixed an issue with AJAX deletion of comments.
• Fixed a divide by 0 error that I’m not sure how could happen, but apparently did for someone. The code is more robust now anyway.
• Don’t add JavaScript code to the post content if not using the API (default) method of recording views.
• Works around a broken data situation where there are no rows in the Popularity Contest options table. I have no idea how you’d trigger this situtation, and still can’t reproduce the issue – but now the code works around it. Thanks to Dave (who apparently has never heard of Hanlon’s Razor) for finding the cause of the issue.

Known Issue in beta 2:

When installing for the first time, the WordPress plugins page reports an error:

Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.

with an empty “fatal error” message. It also successfully activates the plugin and creates the proper default settings – everything seems to work just as planned. I spent a few minutes playing with various things, but without any error message or anything in the error log, I haven’t found the cause of this yet. If any other devs have time to check this out, I’d certainly appreciate the help.

Aside from this and perhaps a few minor tweaks based on feedback, I think this is just about ready for the final 2.0 release.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please contact the WordPress HelpCenter or you can try the WP Support Forums.

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.