Popularity Contest
This is a great plugin which automatically ranks your most popular posts. It allows you to really see how people are using your site and which areas of your site are the most popular. It’s obviously pretty handy for users to see what parts of your site are popular and to easily access those pages. Unfortunately, for Wordpress 2.5 Alex King hasn’t released a working version yet, but you can download the latest version and the fix from here.
After you download the plugin, upload it to your plugins directory, and then activate it from the Wordpress admin panel. In my case, I want to put it in the sidebar. I had no idea how to do this so I had to experiment by placing the code in different parts of the sidebar.php file.
But, actually it wasn’t too hard in the end. First of all, go to your sidebar.php file and then scroll down to the place where you want to insert the code (this was the hard part for me!). Because I wanted to place it on the right-hand side of my page, I looked for a description of the right hand side – which I eventually found called <div class="sidebar_right">. I put the following code directly underneath this and ‘voila’ I had it working!! If you want to make the heading bigger you can replace ‘h2′ with ‘h1′ and you can change the name if you want as well and that will be reflected on your site.
<h2>Popular Posts</h2>
After this heading simply add the following code :
<ul><?php akpc_most_popular(); ?></ul>