WordPress Plugin: Top Posts by Category
ADVERTISEMENTSI have mentioned before the importance of a Top Posts page - it makes it easier for visitors to find the best content on your blog without having to dig through your archives and helps you to to get them to subscribe to your feed and convert them to regular readers easily.
Until yesterday I was manually listing out important posts on my Top Posts page. But it is no more needed to do it manually thanks to Marc Macalua who contacted me yesterday as soon as he finished his Top Posts by Category plugin.
Top Posts by Category is a plugin for WordPress that allows bloggers to display their best posts categorywise, as determined by the number of visits to the post or number of comments.
You can view my Top Posts page (by number of comments) in action here.
Features
- You can choose between displaying top visited posts or top commented posts
- You can choose to display top posts by category or you can display the top posts regardless of category
- You can choose to display the actual number of visits or comments for each post featured on the Top Post Page
- You can control the number of top posts to display, i.e. display N top posts per category
Installation
Installation is easy. Just upload tpbc.php to your plugins folder and activate it. And then go to Options > Top Post to customize options.
How to display the Top Posts list
To display your Top Posts list within a page or a post, just put [ tpbc_list ] (remove spaces) where you want the list to show up.
Or if you would like to display your Top Posts list on your sidebar, put where you want the list to show up.
Suggestions
After trying out the plugin please help the author improve the plugin by giving your valuable suggestions. Right now the only feature I would like added is an an option to hide certain categories.
What suggestions do you have for the plugin?
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Posted on February 1st, 2007 | Category: WordPress Plugins |
Dj Flush
February 1, 2007 at 3:31 pm
Thanx John
I will use this plugin on my blog
btw did u reset ur top commenters?
JohnTP
February 1, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Currently I have set it to reset automatically in the beginning of every month.
Ryan
February 1, 2007 at 8:05 pm
I’ve seen this on other blogs, too, but haven’t found a good plugin, so thanks for the heads up. I’m going to go try and add this to my blog.
David Bradley Science Writer
February 2, 2007 at 2:11 am
I’ve installed this plugin (previously been using Alex King’s Popularity Contest, which is cool too, but I couldn’t figure out how to create this kind categories page to go with the sidebar listing.
But….one thing…I couldn’t get AdSense to run on the page with this post included. Any ideas what might be going on?
db
Dj Flush
February 2, 2007 at 3:23 am
John I have a query that are these two plugins compatible with each other
Top Posts by Category and Popularity Contest and doesnt the latter plugin do the same work as the former one
?
JohnTP
February 2, 2007 at 12:34 pm
David Bradley-
Why not? My Top Posts page has AdSense Ads running on it.
Dj Flush- Maybe, but Top Posts by Category plugin is better.
David Bradley Science Writer
February 2, 2007 at 3:55 pm
the adsense box just didn’t show up, don’t know why. Thought it might be a caching issue, but didn’t show up on another machine with an empty cache either. I’ll try again.
Meanwhile, anyone know how to exclude specific posts, specific categories, or how to re-order categories on the top posts by category page
db
Ashish Mohta
February 3, 2007 at 6:09 pm
The plugin is super cool but is it compatible with wp 2.1.If anybody had tried to share it here.There is no compatibility thing available with the release.
JohnTP
February 3, 2007 at 6:16 pm
David Bradley and Ashish Mohta- I have mailed the plugin author asking these questions. I will let you know if the author replies.
Veron
February 3, 2007 at 6:25 pm
This is cool but it would also mean that the older posts have less views while the new posts on the homepage would garner the most number of views. So more likely than not, the top posts would always be the newest posts.
For those of us that are already using other view-tracking plugins such as GamerZ’s PostViews or Alex King’s Popularity Contest, chances are we wouldn’t be switching to this.
JohnTP
February 3, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Veron- You may try displaying it by top commented posts then.
Christer Edwards
February 4, 2007 at 11:26 am
I checked out this plugin but I didn’t like it. Good idea, but I think it simply duplicates a sitemap, which everyone should have anyway.
Thanks for the tip though. I’m sure I wouldn’t have found it otherwise.
Thilak
February 6, 2007 at 1:04 am
I was looking for a plugin just like this one. Thanks for bringing this to light John.
everton
February 20, 2007 at 6:07 am
I just tried it - it can’t cope with posts that are posted to multiple categories which is a shame
Dan and Jennifer
February 22, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Hey John,
Thanks. We just installed Top Posts a couple of days ago - it’s working great. Giving visitors a different way to find your content is always a good thing.
Noticed an interesting quirk/bug - the plugin also detects hits to posts in DRAFT. Not an issue after you make it live and get a bunch of hits to your real popular posts, but there is that minor chance that your draft post will get Google cached with the wrong path, etc.
This seems much more useful to a reader than a dump of all your content - a sitemap. Sitemaps are great for search engines, but I think featuring your most read posts adds value to your readers.
We’re also going to add a little section at teh top of this top posts page showing our favorite posts, and leave the auto generated list of top posts underneath.
Have an awesome day!
Dan
wildbluff_matt
March 3, 2007 at 12:55 am
Very nice. I was looking for this type of plugin. With some of the popular posts heading off the front page I needed a way to pull them back to the front again. Thanks.
chatca
March 5, 2007 at 1:03 pm
get it and install it…
share more usefull plugin that you used john, perhap my blog come to pr 6 or more too…