How to display Popular Post in your wordpress sidebar

Two Days ago I wrote a post about How to display recent posts in your wordpress sidebar and gave reasons on why one should include that. A few of the users brought up the point that displaying Popular Post is equally if not more in the benefit of the user. It is very debatable because in some cases recent post works better whereas in some cases popular post would work better. Therefore, I have decided that I will show my users to install the popular post in their wordpress as well. (Also this was requested by Bruce of Authority Directory)

Popular Post Plugin

This plugin will display popular post in your sidebars, or anywhere where you want to put this plugin. The popular post will be determined by pageviews.

This plugin would work easier for those who will use it dynamically with the widget in the admin panel. If you want to include this somewhere else other than the sidebar of the template, you can still do it. I have added a very useful article to Balkhis which shows How to add Dynamic Sidebar in wordpress. Basically follow that tutorial, if you want to display it in some other place than your sidebar, but want to use the widget area in the admin panel. All what you would have to do is paste the last code discussed in that tutorial anywhere on the template for instance footer or whatnot.

Once you have done that,

Download the plugin

Upload the plugin, Activate it.

Go to your Themes section and click on the sub menu that says Widgets.

Add this widget into your selected sidebar, and customize it. You are good to go.

Now If you don’t have any issues with codes and can edit those very well, than you can also take the approach of doing it simply the codes way rather than the widget way.

You can display this code anywhere in your template:

<?php if (function_exists(‘WPPP_show_popular_posts’)) WPPP_show_popular_posts(); ?>

This is just a basic code that will show popular post. You would still have to download and activate the plugin.

You can also add multiple parameters to make your plugin customized.

title (title of the widget, you can add tags (e.g. <h3>Popular Posts</h3>) default: Popular Posts)

number (number of links shown, default: 5)

days (length of the time frame of the stats, default 0, i.e. infinite)

show (can be: both, posts, pages; default both)

format (the format of the links shown, default: <a href=’%post_permalink%’ title=’%post_title%’>%post_title%</a>)

For the format there are more variables also.

%post_permalink% the link to the post

%post_title% the title the post

%post_title_attribute% the title of the post; use this in attributes, e.g. <a title=’%post_title_attribute%’…

%post_views% number of views

For more information on this visit: FAQ Page

Hopefully this helps you guys.