Kevin has a fantastic post to change the boring thumbnail and text posts generated by my plugin Contextual Related Posts into clean and neat image based list with some CSS magic.

This will be one of the styles that I plan on implementing in a future style of the plugin. Would you using this code?

If you’re wondering of an easy method to implement the CSS code, you should check out my other plugin Add to All which will allow you easily add custom CSS code to your header.

About 2 weeks back I released a minor update to Top 10. This is a minor update that fixes the links in the Dashboard widgets when you login to your WP-Admin.

I have been working on an update for Contextual Related Posts to incorporate some of the changes in Top 10, especially related to thumbnail support. A summary of changes in v1.7 and 1.7.1 are:

1.7.1

• Fixed: Minor bug fix for location of thumbnail

1.7

• Added: New function related posts() that allows you to manually add posts to your theme
• Added: Support for Video Thumbnails plugin
• Added: Thumbnail settings now reflect max width and max height instead of fixed width and height
• Added: Option to display thumbnails before or after the title
• Added: Option to not display thumbnails instead of the default thumbnail
• Added: Plugin now uses InnoDB instead of MyISAM if your server is running mySQL v5.6 or higher
• Modified: Cleaner Settings page interface
• Modified: Updated FAQ page

This update is the first step towards adding in better support for styling the list, which has been the biggest request from most users of the plugin.

I have also added a wishlist for features I would like to add in future versions. As usual, suggestions and feature requests are welcome and will be implemented as soon as practicable.

I released a minor update to my related posts plugin 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.

Changes:

• Fixed: Few code tweaks to optimise mySQL performance
• Added: Dutch and Spanish language files

The mySQL tweaks are courtesy Mike Schroder, who contacted me with some key ways to optimise the mySQL query lookups. With these changes, the plugin should be a lot lighter on your mySQL databases especially if you got tonnes of posts and content.

I have also added in the Dutch and Spanish translations to this release. The current set of translations include:

• Danish by Team Blogos
• Dutch by WPwebshop
• Italian by Gianni
• Spanish by Octavio

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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

Am extremely pleased to announce a major upgrade to 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.

Changes:

• New: The plugin extracts the first image in the post and displays that if the post thumbnail and the post-image meta field is missing
• New: Display excerpts in the list
• New: Credit link to the CRP page added. You can choose to turn this off, though I would appreciate if you leave it on.
• Updated: All parts of the list are now wrapped in classes for easy CSS customisation

If you are using this plugin, please do consider a donation towards its development.

Read more and download Contextual Related Posts

Just put through updates for three of my plugins:

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.

Top 10

Count page views on posts and display a list of top posts by page views.

Where did they go from here?

This plugin will show “Readers who viewed this page, also viewed” links on your page. This is similar to Amazon’s product pages which state “Readers who have bought this, also bought”.

The first two plugin updates include a fix for the display of thumbnails using postmeta. The plugin didn’t recognise any field other that ‘post-image’. This has been fixed now.

Regarding Where did they go from here, I noticed a minor bug that could cause a clash with any other plugin that is using a similar function call. This one didn’t warrant a major fix, however I don’t want any blogs breaking out there!

I’ve just uploaded Where did they go from here v1.3.1 to the repository.

This plugin will show "Readers who viewed this page, also viewed" links on your page.

The one and major change is a one liner of code that I had missed in my earlier release. Unfortunately, the old release would not have tracked any new hits. So, please upgrade to this version immediately.

I have a new version on the cards that improves thumbnail detection and with better support for non-standard WordPress installations, i.e. where the wp-content or plugin folders have been moved from their normal locations.

Read more about Where did they go from here?

Let me begin 2010 by announcing an update to my plugin Where did they go from here?

Have you seen Amazon.com’s product pages? They all have a “Readers who have bought this, also bought. So, why not implement this on your WordPress blog?

This plugin will show “Readers who viewed this page, also viewed” links on your page.

Changes:

• Added localisation support
• Better support for blogs where wp-content folder has been moved
• Added support for post thumbnails
• Added option to display the post excerpt in the list
• All parts of the list are now wrapped in classes for easy CSS customisation
• Uninstall will clean up the meta tables

Read more and download “Where did they go from here?”

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

The new version of Connections Reloaded fixes a bug that didn’t allow you to modify the number of posts to display.

The major update has been the support for WordPress 2.9, especially the thumbnail support.

The plugin will first check if the post contains a thumbnail. If it doesn’t then it will check the meta field (configurable). If this is not available, then it will show the default image as specified in the options screen.

You can choose whether you want to display options, text or both.

I’ve also added support for configuring the output. You can choose exactly what HTML you want to use. The default settings are an unordered list.

This plugin update is the first in the series of updates that I plan to release over the next several days. I’ll be adding similar support to my Top 10 and Where did they go from here? plugins.

Read more about Contextual Related Posts