Last week, we gave you two plugins to play with. And this week we’re back with yet another plugin.
Way back in 2005, Mark released the Top 10 posts plugin that allowed you to track page views and display them on your blog post. You could also display a list of popular posts.
With WordPress 2.7, a update was necessary and here it is.
The Top 10 plugin for WordPress will track page views on single and post pages and store them safely in a table in the WordPress database. You can then display the count in your post automatically, or either manually.
Features:
- Counts page views on single posts and pages
- Display the count on the single posts and pages
- Customize the text that can be displayed
- Display a list of popular posts by page count. The number can be customized.
- Clean uninstall if you choose to delete the plugin from within WP-Admin
- Works with WP Super Cache
The best part about Top 10 is that it is compatibile with WP Super Cache. It will count page views even with WP Super Cache enabled and a unique feature with this plugin is that it will display the latest count from the database even on cached posts.
This plugin, though fully functional, is still in its nascent phase. There are several features that can be added and I already have a few planned. I’m looking forward to suggestions and feature requests to make Top 10 a truly useful plugin for all of you!
We have it running on this blog and I also have it running on Techtites. Check out the bottom of the posts for a demo.
So, pen down your comments on the plugin page or in the comments section below.
Thanks for sharing. I’m looking for a popular post plugin. This post just come in time.
Great! Do let me know how it works out for you 🙂
this plug in is good,
but practically i.e. for big sites this is a headache
because it stores some more information into database and fetches from database i.e. more load on server.
for this purpose, i use stats plugin which uses wordpress.com database and i use top posts plugin to display top posts.
i don’t want to disappoint you ( i know howmuch you worked and howmuch you have excited ) but just telling my opinion.
thanks.
Actually, this is running out here at WLTC which gets thousands of visitors daily 🙂
I’m not sure how far true it is, but in case of the stats plugins, I believe fetching from an external server is a lot slower than fetching from your local server.
Has anyone run some tests on this?
thanks for sharing this info, I will try the plugin.
WP-SuperCache sucks big time. Could you please try this with 1BlogCacher (which just works, and often better than WPSC) and let us know if it’s compatible? Thanks!
I’m working on a version that should be independent of the caching plugin.
Btw, popularity can be measured by number of views, and by number of comments/trackbacks. It would be nice if your plugin allowed us to choose, or even better, weight these two criteria in our own personal calculation of “popularity”. To me, number of views doesn’t matter. I care about comments.
I already plan to order by comments. However, running a weightage is something I will have to thing about. Can’t promise this.
If anyone has an idea on how this can be implemented, do let me know.
Thanks for considering. About weighting, you can let me set my percentage. I would give
60% Comments ($c_percentage)
40% Views ($v_percentage)
Other people may have other preference between these two. Once you have a percentage for me, you can calculate a “popularity score” for each post:
popularity score =
(number of comments * $c_percentage +
number of views * $v_percentage ) / 100
Then sort by this popularity score.
Sounds good. But, will have to seriously look into how this can be managed. I for see a problem on blogs with lots of posts.
No promises yet. But, I’ll give it a shot 🙂
Make a separate table for this plugin that caches the counts (hourly, daily, weekly….this could also be an option in the config, I personally just need daily Top 10, not hourly).
Cool. That’s a good idea.
You’re welcome. I would like to have this recency selection as a parameter for easy querying…I am doing this right now using pure SQL outside of WordPress, and i cache the daily/monthly/yearly/ever counts into a file with four arrays. Works fine for me. But a plugin would be super as it’d then cache the generated page using 1BlogCacher. (I hope your cache-independent version is not using silly widgets/JS or something..) many thanks!