Series of posts, related posts & popular posts
One of the disadvantages of a chronologically organised blog is that older posts tend to get burried under newer ones. A shame when your posts do not have a limited shelf life. A similar problem occurs when you write posts that belong to a series of directly related posts, it is difficult for the reader to keep track of all parts and read them in the correct order.
In this article I will look at a few plugins that deal with these issues.
Series of posts
Travis Snoozy wrote the one of a kind plugin In Series, an invaluable tool for stringing together posts in a series. You can easily add, re-order and remove posts from a series from the Write/Edit Post page. It will automatically build a table of contents, previous/next links etc. This does not require you to hack your theme, it works right away. You can of course customize how series information is displayed.
This plugin is a must-have for me. Thanks to this plugin, whenever you add a new post to a series you won’t have to go through the hassle of editing every single previous post in the series and add a link to the latest addition, the plugin takes care of all that in a very elegant way. A huge time saver.
Related posts
There are many plugins available that can generate a list of posts related to the one being viewed, one of those tasks that is hard to keep up-to-date manually. Unfortunately most are out-of-date or have limited functionality, i.e. merely tag matching.
The best plugin I found so far, and one that works with WordPress 2.5.1, is Similar Posts by Rob Marsh. Similarity is judged according to a post’s title, content, and tags and you can adjust the balance of factors to fit your needs. If you like, you can even exclude specific posts or change a pletoria of other options. Pretty need!
This plugin requires an additional library plugin shared by the author’s various plugins and a simple inclusion in your single.php.
Popular posts
Knowing which posts are the most popular of your website can give you great insight in what your visitors are interested in. Perhaps you can write additional posts, provide even more specific information. Or maybe you simply want to publish a list of popular posts. A very popular plugin that can help you with that is Popularity Contest by Alex King. It keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses a balanced formula to calculate a popularity score for each post. Each view has a different weight attached, e.g. clicking a post’s permalink is weighted higher in the overall popularity score than merely viewing the post as shown on the homepage. You can adjust the weights according to your preferences.
The bad news is, the current version of Popularity Contest does not work with WordPress 2.5.1. The good news is, with a few pointers by Ken McGuire, I have patched the plugin to work properly without any further manual action required.
Popularity Contest plugin (patched for WordPress 2.5.1)
Tags: in series, plugin, popular posts, popularity contest, related posts, series of posts, similar posts
June 7th, 2008 at 8:15 am
Thank you for the fix. It helped me while using the options theme.
June 9th, 2008 at 12:02 am
Thx a lot man for the patch for the Popularity Contest! Works totally fine for my blog! Great to being able to stick to the plugin!
Greets
June 9th, 2008 at 5:21 am
thx bro, now I can use the popularty plugin again at my blog
June 9th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
great help, thanks a ton. see it in action at http://www.rfwebstudio.com. Thanks again.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
[...] plugin turned out to be non compatible with the latest version of WP. Luckily a smart techie has patched this plugin so it works just great with the new version of [...]
June 12th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
When I install the plugin I get the following message : Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.
I have a 2.5.1 wordpress installation
any ideas ?
June 12th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Tom, are you sure you activated my patched version? The error you are getting is what you would get if you were to active the unpatched version.
To check, open the popularity-contest.php file and look for ‘yellowup.com’ in the comments. If you can’t find it you are not using the patched version.
June 15th, 2008 at 11:11 am
[...] publishing this post I discovered another patched version of the plugin from yellowup.com here that doesn’t appear to require any changes to your database. I haven’t tried it (I [...]
June 15th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Mr. Yellow - Thanks for writing a fix for the plugin! I discovered your fix after I wrote an entire step-by-step tutorial (complete with screenshots) here:
http://tystips.com/archives/35/how2-get-popularity-contest-plugin-working-in-wordpress-251/#respond
Oh, the horror
Oh well. If anyone has trouble with your plugin, or if they are sadistic and actually want to delve into their SQL database files, I thought I would point them to my post.
Thanks again for all your hard work on fixing this!
June 15th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Hi Tyler,
Sorry to hear you put all that effort into your article and THEN found my patched version of Popularity Contest
At the very least it is nice you put in an effort to help others hey, I’ve read some of your other articles.
Keep it up and I’ll strive to do the same
Mr Yellow
June 22nd, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Excellent move. We owe you a coffe, no honestly, we do
July 1st, 2008 at 1:27 am
Thanks, this is the ONLY one that activated for me!
July 10th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Thankyoooooooooou!
July 21st, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Thank You Thank You Thank You!!!
I was upgrading a client’s blog from 2.3.1 to 2.6, and didn’t realize that this plugin wouldn’t work once I upgraded it (which, of course, broke his blog) — a frantic search led me to you, and your patch works excellently.
Life. Saver.
August 12th, 2008 at 2:46 am
Can you help me with inserting the proper php code in my theme’s sidebar to get the popular posts to display on my home page? I am not sure what to include and where to include it…
November 11th, 2008 at 9:06 am
Hi,
I’m using wp 2.6.3, i’ve installed your patched version of popularity contest hoping it would work. only problem i have is it doesn’t save the popularity options. rather it saves them in the options table but doesn’t display the saved option in the wp dashboard, plus if i change another value and press update it reverts all other values to the default.
any ideas?
December 3rd, 2008 at 6:25 am
nice work.. Thanks for the patch
December 16th, 2008 at 8:19 am
So I have another question, it doesn’t show results (popular posts) on when i do a search. just shows “none”. Is there any solutions to my previous question above? regarding not being able to save options.
January 8th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Cheers for the fix, that came in handy.
March 17th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Ok I’ve answered my own question, thought I’d post it here in case it helps someone. Regarding the popular posts not showing up on a search page, it conflicts with the “search everything” plugin. Once i de-activated my search plugin it was all ok.