Content So Hot You’ll Freak

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With the popularity of WordPress as a blogging platform, there is certainly no shortage of plugins available to help blog owners tweak their site to do amazing things (and sometimes not so amazing things).

One of the plugins that is quite popular – no pun intended – is the Recently Popular plugin that provides a widget to display the most popular posts over a specified period of time. This is a plugin that I have used myself on a few blogs and was about to use on this blog…

And then it hit me.

Rather than installing another plugin to accomplish the goal of adding the most popular posts to the sidebar, why not see if I can leverage an existing plugin that displays blog stats within the administration panel?

Content So Hot You’ll Freak

Sure, I could have gone with the more standard “Recently Popular” or “Popular Posts” descriptions but that’s not my steeze. Instead, you will now see a listing in the sidebar that contains the top ten posts over the last 90 days – more appropriately named “Content So Hot You’ll Freak”.

How can you add this to your blog?

First, you will need to be sure that you are running the WordPress.com Stats plugin that was mentioned earlier. In addition, you will need to be running one of the plugins that allow you to execute PHP code in your widgets or posts (my plugin of choice for this is Exec PHP).

Once you have satisfied the pre-requisites, you simply need to add the following code to one of your sidebar widgets:

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<?php if ( function_exists('stats_get_csv') && $top_posts = stats_get_csv('postviews', 'days=90&limit=11') ) : ?>
    <ul>
<?php foreach ( $top_posts as $p ) : ?>
  <?php if($p['post_id'] != 0) : ?>
        <li><a title="<?php echo $p['post_title']; ?>" href="<?php echo $p['post_permalink']; ?>"><?php echo $p['post_title']; ?></a></li>
  <?php endif; ?>
<?php endforeach; ?>
    </ul>
<?php endif; ?>

But I don’t want my home page in the list…

The bulk of the code snippet above is directly from the FAQ for the WordPress.com Stats plugin, but the problem was that the blog home page was displaying as one of the top 10 results.

In order to prevent the home page from displaying in the list, I added the following conditional statement within the loop that writes out each link:

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<?php if($p['post_id'] != 0) : ?>
...
<?php endif; ?>

Basically, this is simply saying that I only want to display the link if the blog post id is anything other than zero as the blog home page has an id of zero.

Brilliant, don’t you think?

How to Customize the Results

As I mentioned earlier, I decided to show the top 10 posts over the last 90 day period but maybe you want to display the top 5 results over the last 7 days, or maybe you would prefer the top 18 posts over the last 22 days.

Whatever the criteria is that you want to use, the piece of code that you need to pay attention to is:

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'days=90&limit=11'

All you need to do is change the values for the “days” parameter and/or the “limit” parameter to get your desired result.

One important note, you will notice that I have a limit of 11 yet I am only displaying 10 posts. Well, if you remember that we filtered out the blog home page from being displayed, we need to account for that by retrieving one more post than we actually want to display.

Yes, this means it is entirely possible that we will end up displaying 11 posts if the blog home page is not among the top 10 visited posts, but that is most likely not going to happen as the home page is often one of the most visited pages of any site.

So now that you know how I have added the “Content So Hot You’ll Freak” to my sidebar, take a minute to check out the most visited posts and let me know which one is your favorite!

Tagged as: blog, plugins, tips and tricks, wordpress