MostWanted - a Popular Posts Plugin for WordPress

November 24th, 2004, by Rich.

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MostWanted - a Popular Posts Plugin for WordPress

MostWanted - a Popular Posts Plugin for WordPress

This WordPress Plugin which lists the most popular posts in a blog, according to the records held by StatTraq…

MostWanted lists the most popular posts on a wordpress powered weblog. This list can be used in the sidebar to provided visitors with an indication of what are the most visited pages.

The MostWanted plugin in use. It’s grown a little since it’s original release so it has a subtle API change. Where previously it was called “rjb_mostwanted”, it is now “MostWanted::mostwanted”. Currently there is a wrapper around the old method name so that it still works, however this will be removed in future releases.

Installation

Download this file
Rename it mostwanted.php and copy it to your /wp-content/plugins folder.
using wp-admin, enable the plugin

Usage

The plugin provides one method of interest: MostWanted::mostwanted($top_n, $trim_chars, $showviews). The three parameters are:

$top_n
the number of results to list default = 5
$curtail
0 for no text curtailment, or ‘n’ the number of characters from each post title that shoudl be displayed. e.g. Curtailing “My Dynamic Badger” to 10 characters would read “My Dyna…”.
default = no curtailment
$showviews
true if the number of times each post has been viewed should be included in the list.
default = false
$show_views_in_tt
TT is short for ToolTip setting this value to true includes the number of views as part of the tool tip. i.e. if you hover over the text the (1234 distinct viewers) message is shown.
default = true
$duration
restricts the duration of the query period so that only the last $duration days are considered when measuring popularity. e.g. a value of 30 would return the number of users only within the last 30 days. Leaving the value unset, or 0, results in the all-time results being returned.
default = 0 (all-time)
$pre
this is a text string that is added to every line.
default = <li>
$post
this is a text string that is added to every line.
default = </li>
$method
there are two ways of identifying unique visitors, neither of which are perfect, the default is to recognize only unique IP addresses, which means that if several people from one company visit, then they may show as a single user. Alternatively, using the session_id is not perfect because some users refuse to set cookies.
default = ip, alternative = session
$as_percentage
if set to true, then the number of hits for each page as a percentage of the site total is displayed instead of the hit count itself. This may be desirable if you want to show popularity without letting on how many hits you get for each story.
default = false
$timeout
adjusts how long the most-wanted information is cached for before being replenished from the db. A value of 0 (zero) will result in fresh data being retrieved for every query, whereas a value of 3600 will only query the database once every hour, cacheing the output and thus reducing DB load.
default = 1800

The simplest way to use the plugin is therefore to augment your page with:
<ul>
<?php MostWanted::mostwanted(); ?>
</ul>

A more tuned version might read:
<ul>
<?php MostWanted::mostwanted(7, 30, true); ?>
</ul>

License

MostWanted is released under a Creative Commons License.

Credits

If you find MostWanted useful, please feel free to link or a trackback to this entry.
Thanks to everyone whose commented with problems, solutions & suggestions, especially:

Ben Gracewood whose previous suggestion here gave me enough of a head start that I was able to come up with the relevant SQL query.
Randy Peterman
Darryll Van Dorp
Michelle Li
Rodney Shupe
Mike Smith

Steve Says:
May 18th, 2005 at 11:50 am

MICHELLE YOU GODDESS!!! This works PEREFECTLY!
Thankyouthankyouthankyou.

Garnet Says:
June 7th, 2005 at 3:21 am

When I activate mostwanted I get this error in WP 1.5.1

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /hsphere/local/home/dhthomas/glitteringstew.com/muse/wp-content/plugins/rjb_mostwanted.php:116) in /hsphere/local/home/dhthomas/glitteringstew.com/muse/wp-admin/admin.php on line 10

But the mostwanted info. at least appears in the sidebar, though with no stats because I just installed it.

David

Garnet Says:
June 7th, 2005 at 5:40 am

Hey, I tried running the fixstat script and I get this error
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: fixstats() in /hsphere/local/home/dhthomas/glitteringstew.com/muse/wp-stattraq/fixstats.php on line 4

I placed it in the wp-stattraq folder.

Also, when I activate the mostwanted plugin in wp-admin I get this error

Please advise. I’m not sure what is going wrong.
David

Garnet Says:
June 7th, 2005 at 6:35 am

I managed to get the statfix to run, but the links to the MostWanted list of posts still uses the post number, with a strange path, index.php?p=77, not the permalink. (I changed the index.php-normal to index.php, but no change in the link effectiveness)

I changed the code for post ID as suggested by Rich above, I even added the snippet of code suggested by Michelle, since I use the date in the permalink.

Any suggestions? Maybe I just need to wait for the new release of stattraq.
David
Sorry for so many comments.

Garnet Says:
June 7th, 2005 at 6:42 am

Infinite apologies, especially to rich. I got it. my blog is in a subdirectory, so I had to change the path from /index.php to /sub/index.php

All is well. please ignore those messages above.

Thank you for a fine plugin of a plugin. Now someone should invent a plugin for your plugin of a plugin.

cheers,
D

Garnet Says:
June 7th, 2005 at 7:48 am

I still can’t get the plugin to play nice with the admin headers. The plugin works on my blog, but shuts down admin, and the error code above is what I get, and later, a similar warning about wp-includes/plugable.php malfunction, again with headers.

I really like this plugin and I hope I can figure out what is not clicking. Thanks for any input. David

Darryl Says:
June 10th, 2005 at 4:42 pm

Hey, you might want to consider letting the mostwanted plugin filter out bots.

$output = $wpdb->get_results( “SELECT p.post_title, st.article_id, COUNT( DISTINCT (st.session_id) ) as cnt FROM $tablestattraq st,
$tableposts p where p.ID=st.article_id and st.user_agent_type=’0′ GROUP BY st.article_id ORDER BY cnt DESC LIMIT 0,$top_n” );

The key point being user_agent_type = ‘0′

Darryl Says:
June 10th, 2005 at 5:45 pm

Also as an idea it’s a quick and easy change to your function to limit the results to ‘x’ days (which i like :)

$output = $wpdb->get_results( “SELECT p.post_title, st.article_id, COUNT( DISTINCT (st.session_id) ) as cnt FROM $tablestattraq st, $tableposts p where p.ID=st.article_id AND st.user_agent_type=’0′ AND DATE_SUB(CURDATE(),INTERVAL $interval DAY) < st.access_time GROUP BY st.article_id ORDER BY cnt DESC LIMIT 0,$top_n” )

rich boakes Says:
June 11th, 2005 at 3:41 pm

Thanks for the suggestions Darryl, I’ll incorporate both in a 0.0.8 release.

Rodney Shupe Says:
June 14th, 2005 at 11:35 pm

I hope you implement the sugestion above to use get_permalink on line 75 I implemented it on my install and it works great:
"’ href=’" . get_permalink($line->article_id) . "’>"

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