I was going through a rather interesting post that Jeff made on WP Tavern. There has been a lot of discussion about credit links in plugins and themes. While themes have been more painful due to the links being misused for sponsored links.

Both Contextual Related Posts and Top 10 have credit links, where I provide the user the option to turn off the credit link. In this version of both these plugins I have changed the default option to off. This means that the plugins on first installation will no longer link back to my site.

However, this option will not change if you upgrade. So, you’ll need to manually turn it off if you don’t want the link.

Again, need I say that I would highly appreciate if you turn on the option. Alternatively, if you’re using the plugin, can I ask you to make a post on what you like about it?

Top 10:

WordPress doesn’t count page views by default. Top 10 will count the number of page views on your single posts on a daily as well as overall basis. You can then display the page view count on individual posts and pages as well as display a list of most popular posts based on page views.

Contextual Related Posts:

Display a list of contextually related posts for the current post. You can select the number of posts to display and if you want to automatically display the related posts in your content / feed.

I’m still looking for translators for both these plugins. If you are interested in translating this plugin, please do contact me.

I’ll also be releasing an update to Where did they go from here? sometime this week with similar changes.

Just released two bug fix updates for two of my plugins:

Top 10

Track daily and total visits on your blog posts and display the count as well as popular posts.

Contextual Related Posts

Display a list of contextually related posts for the current post.

Changes to Contextual Related Posts:

• Fixed: Custom output was not detecting styles properly
• Fixed: Incorrect XHTML code was being generated when using special characters in the post title
• Added German translation

Changes to Top 10:

• Added: You can now use HTML in the counter display

It’s Christmas time and this is my third gift to you this Christmas, the first being an update to Contextual Related Posts and the second being an update to Connections Reloaded.

I’ve just committed v1.5 for Top 10.

Top 10 will count the number of page views on your single posts on a daily as well as overall basis. You can then display the page view count on individual posts and pages as well as display a list of most popular posts based on page views.

The new version of Top 10 adds support for WordPress 2.9 thumbnails, with a fallback to display thumbnails using custom fields (configurable) and a default image in case both are missing. You can choose the location of the default image.

You can also configure the display. The default settings is an unordered list, but you can easily customize this to display an ordered list, divs, spans or just about any other HTML tag.

If you are using this plugin, do consider a donation.

Read more or download Top 10

I’d like to announce that I have just updated my Top 10 plugin.

Top 10 will count the number of page views on your single posts on a daily as well as overall basis. You can then display the page view count on individual posts and pages as well as display a list of most popular posts based on page views.

This update adds a much requested feature, viz. the option to separately choose if you want to display the number of views on pages and posts. By default both options are turned on. You can change the setting in the options page in WP-Admin.

I have also modified the plugin for localisation. I’m looking for translators for the plugin. If you’re interested please contact me.

I’ve been working actively on Top 10 for the past few days and well, it’s turning out well. This version release includes the following changes:

• Added the Popular Posts sidebar widget in your theme.
• Uses JavaScript by default to count. Hence, better support for different caching plugins
• Change format to display count. Now, a single textarea instead of two text boxes.
• Added WordPress 2.7 Dashboard widget to display popular posts on your Dashboard

Current users should be able to upgrade from within WP-Admin itself. Others, read more and download Top 10 – A Page Counter and Popular Posts plugin for WordPress.

And, the development continues. So, here’s what you’ll see in v1.2 of Top 10:

• Display of page-views on the Edit pages of your posts / pages as an extra column (completed)
• Tracking of Daily Popular Posts and display of the same (WIP)
• Popular Posts by Comments (yet to begin)
• Ability to reset count (yet to begin)

What else would you like to see in this plugin? Comment below or the plugin page.

Last week I gave you Contextual Related Posts and Moderation Author Notify. Have spent almost the whole of this week rewriting Mark’s original Top 10 plugin. And, that sure has been a rather interesting, frustrating and of course fulfilling journey in PHP in general and WordPress in particular and I still believe I’ve not even scratched the surface of PHP, SQL and WordPress!

Anyway, I began with duplicating the original functionality of the plugin, however, ensuring that this strictly followed the latest Plugin API recommended by WordPress.

So, a few things that were changed / added were:

• The table to store the statistics now has the prefix (wp_) by default. So, if you have multiple blogs stored in the same database with different prefixes, this plugin will not mess up the stats.
• An options page to set the text you want displayed for the counter as well as for the popular posts
• Uninstall support so that all changes by the plugin are reversed on deletion from within WP-Admin. But, why would you?
• Ability to automatically add the viewed count to your single posts and pages.

Having all this in place, I ran a test on my blog Techtites and was pleased with the results, except for one major bottleneck. With WP Super Cache disabled the plugin tracked page views and displayed the counts correctly. However, the moment I enabled the cache the plugin would no longer update, and the page views were singe.

So, began the long and painful process of researching and figuring out how to bypass the cache. Well, to make a long story short, you can’t bypass the cache. However, what you can do is use JavaScript or AJAX for the same. Fortunately, the WordPress Codex has a well written article on using AJAX in Plugins. I was able to implement the same into the plugin.

This is where I would like to thank Thaya Kareeson for his help on the same. He kindly went through the code and helped me debug. We found out that the plugin counter updated properly. However, to display the count would require some more AJAX / JavaScript. Thaya is known for his super-awesome plugin WP Greet Box [my review on WLTC], which I have running on this blog as well as Techtites.

I finally decide to implement the count display using a mix of PHP and JavaScript. I’ll blog about this later today on Techtites (subscribe).

After some rigorous testing, I give you Top 10 – A Page Counter and Popular Posts plugin for WordPress.

So why don’t you download and install it on your blog. I have a lot of feature additions planned for this plugin and as usual I’m open to all suggestions and feature requests. Do comment here or on the plugin page directly with the same.

Overview:

WordPress doesn’t count page views by default. Top 10 will count the number of page views on your single posts on a daily as well as overall basis. You can then display the page view count on individual posts and pages as well as display a list of most popular posts based on page views.

Includes a sidebar widget to display the popular posts. And, all settings can be configured from within your WordPress Admin area itself! You can choose to disable tracking of author visits on their own posts.

Features:

• Counts daily and total page views on single posts and pages
• Display the count on the single posts and pages
• Customize the text that can be displayed
• Display a list of daily and/or overall popular posts by page count. The number can be customized.
• Sidebar widgets available for daily popular and overall popular posts.
• View list of daily and/or overall popular posts from within the dashboard itself
• Clean uninstall if you choose to delete the plugin from within WP-Admin
• Works with caching plugins like WP-Super-Cache
• Supports post thumbnail images

Requirements:

• WordPress 2.5 or above

Installing

1. Download Top 10.
2. Extract the contents of top-10.zip to wp-content/plugins/ folder. You should get a folder called top-10.
3. Activate the Plugin in WP-Admin.
4. Goto Options > Top 10 to configure.
5. Goto Appearance > Widgets to add the Daily Popular / Popular Posts sidebar widget to your theme

Options

Below is the options screen as you would see it when you activate the plugin.

You can customize how the count is displayed. Use %totalcount% to display the total count and %dailycount% to display the daily count.

Enable / disable display of post count in content on single posts and pages. If you don’t enable the first option, then you will need to add <?php if(function_exists('echo_tptn_post_count')) echo_tptn_post_count(); ?>.

In order to display the most popular posts, you will need to add <?php if(function_exists('tptn_show_pop_posts')) tptn_show_pop_posts(); ?>.

In order to display the most popular posts, you will need to add <?php if(function_exists('tptn_show_daily_pop_posts')) tptn_show_daily_pop_posts(); ?>.

Alternatively, use the sidebar widgets to display the overall or daily top posts.

By default the plugin adds a link back to this page in your popular posts lists. You can choose to uncheck that above. However, it would be great if you could give me some linky love.

ChangeLog:

• 1.7.5
  • Added: Now supports multiple WordPress widgets
• 1.7
  • Added: Excludes posts in the top lists from select categories
  • Modified: Performance improvements
  • Modified: Better compatibility with the latest versions of WordPress. If you are using the sidebar widgets, please re-add them to your theme under Appearance > Widgets
• 1.6.3
  • Fixed: PHP errors on certain installs
  • Added: Dutch language
• 1.6.2
  • Fixed: Multiple rows being created for same ID
  • Fixed: Counter display
  • Added: New button to clear the duplicate rows in the tables
  • Fixed: Top 10 should be lighter on the server now
• 1.6.1
  • Turned the credit option to false by default. This setting won’t effect current users.
  • Turned off borders on post thumbnails. You can customise the CSS class “tptn_thumb” to style the post thumbnail.
  • The plugin will now display a list of changes in the WordPress Admin > Plugins area whenever an update is available
  • Fixed: Display of caching plugin compliant daily top posts lists
• 1.6
  • Added: Added support for excerpts and detection of first image in the post
  • Added: Daily posts are tracked using the blog time instead of server time
  • Fixed: On the first visit, display 1 instead of 0
  • Fixed: Fixed uninstall script
• 1.5.3
  • Added: You can now use HTML in the counter display
• 1.5.2
  • Fixed: Display of thumbnails using postmeta
• 1.5.1
  • Fixed some compatibility issues with WordPress 2.9 and YARPP
• 1.5
  • Added support for WordPress 2.9 post thumbnails
• 1.4.1
  • Fixed compatibility with WordPress 2.9
  • Fixed XHTML validation errors in output code
  • Added buttons to reset post count of overall and daily posts
• 1.4
  • Added localisation support
  • Separate options to display number of views on posts and pages
• 1.3
  • “Daily Popular” can now be selected over user selectable number of days
  • Option to turn off display of number of pageviews in popular posts list
  • Option to make “Daily Popular” list compatible with caching plugins
  • Posts > Top 10 page to view detailed list of popular posts
• 1.2
  • Do not display Drafts in Related Posts anymore
  • Option to disable tracking author visits on their own posts
  • Display top posts for the current day
• 1.1
  • Added the Popular Posts sidebar widget in your theme.
  • Uses JavaScript by default to count. Hence, better support for different caching plugins
  • Change format to display count. Now, a single textarea instead of two text boxes.
  • Added WordPress 2.7 Dashboard widget to display popular posts on your Dashboard
• 1.0.1 – Release

To Do:

• Popular Posts by Comments
• Comment below and tell me what you would like to see added to this plugin

Support the Development

Writing and testing plugins takes a good amount of time. If you like the plugin and find it useful and would like to donate something for my work please do click the PayPal Donate button below. The payment is secure. I haven’t filled in any amount. Feel free to donate what you please. Any amount is welcome. Thank you

License

All files and their contents are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Questions or Bugs

Known Bugs

If you have any questions or would like to report any bugs then please use the support forum.

Languages

The following translations are available:

• Azerbaijani by WebhostingRating
• Belorussian by FatCow
• Dutch by Rene
• German by Ulli
• Hindi by Ashish
• Irish by Let’s be Famous
• Italian by Gianni
• Russian by Kopper
• Ukrainian by Web Geek

If you would like to make available a translation for the plugin, please do drop me an email.

Downloads

Download Top 10 v1.8
Number of downloads: 53,827
Rating: 5/5
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