On my homepage, I have the three most popular posts. Finding a plugin that did what I wanted and that worked with WordPress 2.6 proved to be quite impossible.
I wanted something that wasn’t so common: display the title, category, date, comments and excerpt, so I had to make something for myself.
At the moment, it’s quite basic. It sorts the posts on comment count, and displays the top n articles. I have three on my homepage. It uses the excellent post plugin library to get the date, category and excerpt into shape. (so, the post plugin library is needed for this to work). The code is based off of this example from the WordPress forums.
I haven’t looked into making wordpress plugins yet, so my popular post solution is just a snippet you can include in your theme:
<?php
$sql='SELECT post_title, comment_count, guid, post_date, post_content, ID
FROM wp_posts
ORDER BY comment_count DESC
LIMIT 3;';
$popresults = $wpdb->get_results($sql);
foreach ($popresults as $r) {
echo '<div class="post">';
echo ' <h3><a href="' . $r->guid . '">' . $r->post_title .'</a>';
echo ' <span>'. otf_categorylinks($r->ID, $r,', ').',';
echo ' <abbr title="'. oth_format_date($r->post_date, "j F Y") . '">'. oth_format_date($r->post_date, "j/m") . '</abbr>,';
echo ' <abbr title="' . $r->comment_count . ' comments">' . $r->comment_count . '</abbr>';
echo ' </span>';
echo ' </h3>';
echo ' <p>'. oth_trim_excerpt($r->post_content, '45') .'…</p>';
echo '</div>';
}
?>This snippet can be improved in a lot of ways. For one, making it a plugin would be a good idea. Secondly, attaching a time-based element would be nice, so that it can become “the popular posts of last month” instead of the all-time popular posts. Even more interesting would be linking it to the WP-Stats plugin. That offers an “active posts” lists, which seems to be based off of comments and visits to a certain posts over a limited period of time.
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Hey Kilian,
Nice snippet. You could improve the load time by not echo-ing each line.
Instead, push the HTML in an array and echo a NULL-join of it after the loop. (use ” and \n for neat HTML).
To prevent empty NULL joins by set up the Array before the foreach().
Cheers,
If table prefix isn’t wp_ you have a problem.
You need change the SQL sentence to this.
global $wpdb;
$sql = ‘SELECT post_title, comment_count, guid, post_date, post_content, ID
FROM ‘.$wbdb->posts.’
ORDER BY comment_count DESC
LIMIT 3;’;
Good snippet.
Thanks for the additions, Korneel and aNieto2k!
Well, It also lists auto saved versions of posts as well.. Any idea how to get only a list of ‘published’ most popular posts?
It does? I must’ve missed that because my popular posts were from before wordpress had more revisions of one post. The solution is simple, luckily, just add
WHERE post_status = "published"between the FROM and the ORDER line.
hi kilian,
great code which much helps more..
and i have doubt instead of print the whole content of the popular post how to reduce the content of the popular post?
thnx,
Ram