What’s it for?

The explosion of people with their own websites (often called ‘blogs) has gone hand in hand with the rise of automated aggregation systems, which attempt to filter out the irrelevant majority so that the end user sees more content that is useful. The digital equivalent of separating the wheat from the chaff.

Sites such as Technorati have taken this concept further by introducing the concept of tags. A tag is a word or phrase that describes what a particular web page is about. It’s essentially a proprietary version of the HTML meta tag – this plugin manages both kinds of tags for you.

Installation instructions

To use it:

1. Download this file – this is the stable release, which is what most people want – if you’d like to try an advance copy of the next version then scroll down
2. Unzip the file and copy it’s contents to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory (so that it’s path is /wp-content/plugins/autometa/).
3. Enable it on the plugins page.
4. Look for the AutoMeta menu which appears on the plugins page once the plugin is enabled.
5. Click the “Add the index” button to create the necessary indexes.
6. That’s it.

Automatic Tag Generation

This plugin will automatically generate and include HTML Meta Tags and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post. When you save your post (and before you publish it) the plugin checks to see if any tags have been associated with it.

If no tags are found then it generates them based on the content of the post.

Hand Written Tags

Automatic extraction of words can never be perfect, so once tags are generated they can be edited and improved by hand.

If, like me, your article goes through several drafts before publication then you’ll notice that the words are generated the first time you save the document, but then they remain unchanged as the finished document evolves. The plugin will automatically regenerate the tags whenever there is no autometa custom field, so if you click on the Delete action, you’ll get a fresh set of auto-generated tags that you can refine by hand.

Hints

I don’t recommend that you use the plugin without hand-tweaking the tags; instead, think of it as a useful guide. If you wish to include tags with a space such as “world wide web” then you should insert dashes where you’d like the spaces to be, i.e. “world-wide-web”.

FAQ

1. Where can I see the tags/keywords in my output?Meta Keywords are added to the document header for each post (you won’t see them on the index page), so load one of a recent post in your browser (one that that you’ve written or saved since the plugin was installed) then view the source of the page. Near the top you’ll see a message detailing the version of autometa that’s in use, and a list of keywords. Technorati tags are either added to the footer (so scroll to the bottom) or, if you’re using a more recent release, the tags may have been included in the document body, so you’ll see them without looking at the source.
2. The plugin is installed and appears to work, but I see just a set of empty quotes where the list of tags should be; what’s wrong?99 times out of 100 you are hitting a bug that existed for a very short time in WordPress 2.0 – it’s been solved as of WordPress 2.0.1, so the problem should disappear when you upgrade.
3. How do I show the Technorati Tags in my sidebar/theme?If you want to add the tags to your sidebar, then that add <?php AutoMeta::includeTechnoratiTags();?> to your theme wherever you want the taglist to appear.
4. Can I customize the output a bit?Yes, you can customize the output a lot. Use the more parameterized <?php AutoMeta::echoTechnoratiTags("headline", "tail", "line prefix","line_suffix", "no_tags_message");?>, modifying the parameters as necessary to fit your theme. For example: <?php AutoMeta::echoTechnoratiTags("<h1>Technorati</h1><ul>", "</ul>", "<li>","</li>", "Zarro Taags!");?>
5. Do I have to have the tags on my page?No. Technorati can discover your tags from the feed (where the tags are included as categories), so (based on experience) it appears that you don’t need visible tags on your page, so just include them if you want to.
6. I want to be as lazy as possible, can the plugin do it’s work when I publish without me having to save it?Yes, that’s the default behaviour, but there is a caveat. If you want to be lazy and just publish then that’s fine, you can, the plugin will still extract the most important words from the article and turn them into tags/keywords. The downside is that if you’ve not mentioned a term in an article then it cannot appear as a tag – so if (for example) you write an article about iPods and don’t mention Apple, then “Apple” can’t be a tag, so there’s an audience group that you’re possibly missing. This is why hand-finishing your tags is recommended.
7. Can I create keywords/tags that are not just single words, like “mostly harmless”, “ford prefect” or “chesterfield sofa”?Yes. These can be created using either the minus or plus characters to separate the words you wish to join. The tags “ford-prefect” and “ford+prefect” both turn out as “ford prefect”. It is recommended that you use the “+” character; the “-” is a hangover from an earlier version and (if people request it) could one day be removed to allow for hyphenated tags.

Planned/Unplanned Features

I don’t have time to extend this at the moment, but I’d like to to have:

1. default set of metadata/tags for use in non article pages
2. a better admin interface
3. user editable tag list length
4. user editable the minimum word length
5. user editable stop list
6. thesaurus lookup, so similar words could be group scored
7. Optional Visible/Invisible technorati tags
8. Tag list in Admin side bar

Versions

A list of all the releases.

Contribute

Embrace and Extend

If anyone would like to extend it, or use the code elsewhere, it’s released under a GPL license. Derivative works must also be free and must credit this work.

Alpha/Beta Testing

A development version of the next release is sometimes available too [nothing is currently available]. If you’re familiar with PHP and comfortable with wordpress hacking, then please, be my guest and help with giving it a jolly good shake to help get all the bugs out. If you’re feeling creative, invent a feature, or try implementing one of the ones listed above. Many hands make light work!

Feedback

Ideas, opinions and descriptions of problems are what can help this plugin get better – share your sparks of inspiration on the forum (or just describe the mists that are clouding your way).

Installation instructions

To use it:

1. If you have a previous version of the plugin, delete it.
2. Download this file
3. Rename the file googleanalytics.php and copy it to your /wp-content/plugins directory.
4. Enable it on the plugins page.
5. Enter your Google Analytics User Account string (it’ll be something like UA-12345-6. It appears when you “Add a channel”)
6. That’s it.

You don’t need to look alter the code in any way to make it run; of course you’re welcome to improve it and send me any updates for inclusion.

Features

• Zero Coding
  A zero coding install enables both the default tracking and the use of different channels for specific posts.
• Outgoing links
  Track which outgoing links your users click on – i.e. the ones that don’t traditionally register in your logs. Separate tracking streams for outbound links that are in the main article, comments, and comment author URL’s
  
• Multiple Channels
  Assign a specific channel to any article by entering the channel ID as metadata. i.e. simply type “analytics” as the metadata field name and the channel ID as the value and you can run a channel for each specific post

Requested Features

• Filtering the Sidebar
  WordPress provides hooks for filtering articles and comments, but not for filtering the sidebar and footer. Since the sidebar often includes the blogroll there are page-exit clicks that cannot be tracked. If anyoen has a clean solution to filtering the sidebar then please speak up!
• 100% Point’n'Click UI
  I’ve asked on the forums to see if there’s away to automate the retrieval of the account id, so hopefully the plugin can become a configuration free install.

Versions

A historical list of releases.

Contribute

Please neatly tuck any feedback, comments, suggestions & requests onto the forum!

To use FixStats, go to the Admin screen then select “Plugins | MostWanted Config”, then press the “Fix Stats” button.

Just in case people search for it… this is what you use to fix the No results available. message.

Cache

This is also the first version that can cache stats results. It’s a feature that I’d written into version 0.1.7, but then I never released 0.1.7 so it’s been rolled into this release.

A new parameter, $timeout, has been added to the method signature. It defines how long the results should be cached for. So to have the MostWanted list generated every time a page is requested, set $timeout to 0 – but – if you’re happy with the table being updated only every 30 minutes, set the timeout to 1800 (which is 60 seconds * 30 mins: 60*30=1800).

Using the cache will mean your DB will get hit far less often by MostWanted, but your list of popular posts will still appear fresh.

Download

As usual, this latest version can be downloaded from the MostWanted page.

Download MostWanted version 0.1.6.

There’s a small version jump with this release from 0.1.4 to 0.1.6 because I wrote, but never got around to releasing 0.1.5, so the code is all rolled together.

Changes for this version therefore include:

1. Added the capability to display the percentage of total hits instead of the hit count. This may be useful for sites that don’t want the intimacies of their traffic to be broadcast, but still want to show some key to how popular a particular item is.
2. The plugin name has changed slightly to “Boakes MostWanted” so that all the plugins I write can exist together within the admin interface.
3. I’ve improved the curtail function so that a $curtail value of 0 returns the full original string rather than “…”.
4. The signature has now been moved to the footer and changed so that it links to the most-wanted home page. This should help to make debugging a bit easier cause the message will be easier to find, and it may also help me identify if people are using a deprecated version of the plugin.

Full details of the plugin are also available here..

What was happening was that if the title of a popular article contained an apostrophe, then that apostrophe was being interpreted as the end of the tooltip, resuling in an invalid tag, and thus an invalid document.

The MostWanted plugin for WordPress can downloaded from: http://boakes.org/most-wanted

Apologies also, to anyone whose RSS reader has pulled down multiple copies of the last ‘n’ stories as i’ve been switching the files around – getting it all to work has meant that several incarnations of non-existent stories may have been picked up by some people.

In this version the posts table is selected based on the user’s profile – this is a “best practice” thing, but, hopefully, sites which run multiple blogs in multiple user tables should be able to correctly report the most popular entries for each… though i think there may be problems with Post ID clashes – we’ll have to wait and see.

See the original MostWanted page for the latest version of the plugin.

It fixes a small hangover from development which meant that the most popular 2 posts weren’t getting shown (this was an attempt to account for the RSS and multiple-posts pages) -it looks like the current version avoids returning these with the data, hence the need for the tweak.

The code is available here.

It adds three parameters to the rjb_mostwanted method which allow the user to control how many results are listed, how “wide” each result should be in terms of characters and finally includes the capability to insert the number of times the post has been viewed into the list.

The code is available here.

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.

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

1. Download this file
2. Rename it mostwanted.php and copy it to your /wp-content/plugins folder.
3. 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:

1. $top_n
   the number of results to list default = 5
2. $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
3. $showviews
   true if the number of times each post has been viewed should be included in the list.
   default = false
4. $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
5. $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)
6. $pre
   this is a text string that is added to every line.
   default = <li>
7. $post
   this is a text string that is added to every line.
   default = </li>
8. $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
9. $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
10. $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

my requirements:
along with the normal metadata which can be seen about any post, i’d like to be able to show how many times that post has been viewed. additionally, by default, i want this information to be restricted to administrators.

to cut a not very long story short, it works. there were a few teething troubles as i worked out how to get the current post ID – and there may be a better way of generating the relative url (please comment if you know of one), but aside from that, i’m a happy bunny because i get my home page, and every posting, with integrated live usage stats.

Installation

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

Usage

In my index.php file, within the loop, and in amongst all the other metadata code, I use the plugin as follows.

<?php rjb_get_view_count( $post->ID, ”, ‘ views<br />’ ); ?>