Overview
Have you seen Amazon.com’s product pages? Amazon is a great example of visitor rentention through recommendations. All of Amazon’s pages have a “Customers who viewed this also viewed”. And how many times have you clicked those links?
Would you like to implement the same feature on your WordPress blog?
Where did you go from here is a feature rich WordPress plugin that will show “Readers who viewed this page, also viewed” links on your page.
The plugin will track what pages or posts visitors on your sites click through and will display this list for the corresponding post. What better way to retain users than to show them exactly what real people are visiting.
How it works?
When a visitor views a blog post, the plugin checks to see if the referrer is another blog post on your site. If this is the case, then the referring post is updated with a reference to this post. And, the process continues as the visitor moves through the blog.
Thus, each post will display a list of links that other visitors went through from here. Hence, the name of the plugin!
You may wish to check out my other plugin Contextual Related Posts that finds related posts based on the content of your current post.
Features
- Automatic: The plugin will start displaying visited posts on your site and feed automatically after the content when you activate the plugin. No need to edit template files
- Manual install: Want more control over placement? Check the FAQ on which functions are available for manual install.
- Tracking: Find out what visitors are looking at on your site by observing which posts they visit
- Exclusions: Exclude select posts and pages from the list of posts. Exclude posts from select categories from the list of posts
- Custom post types: The visited posts list lets you include posts, pages, attachments or any other custom post type!
- Styles: The output is wrapped in CSS classes which allows you to easily style the list. You can enter your custom CSS styles from within WordPress Admin area
- Customisable output:
- Display excerpts in post. You can select the length of the excerpt in words
- Customise which HTML tags to use for displaying the output in case you don’t prefer the default
listformat
- Thumbnail support:
- Support for WordPress post thumbnails
- Auto-extract the first image in your post to be displayed as a thumbnail
- Manually enter the URL of the thumbnail via WordPress meta fields
- Use timthumb to resize images or use your own filter function to resize post images
Requirements
- WordPress 3.0 or above
Installing
- Download Where did they go from here?.
- Extract the contents of
where-did-they-go-from-here.ziptowp-content/plugins/folder. You should get a folder calledwhere-did-they-go-from-here. - Activate the Plugin in WP-Admin.
- Goto Options > Where did they go to configure.
Options
Below are screenshots of the options available in the Settings screen
-
Options in WP-Admin - General options
-
Options in WP-Admin - Output options
-
Options in WP-Admin - Feed options
-
Options in WP-Admin - Custom styles
If you choose to not use the automatic install, you will need to add <?php if(function_exists('echo_ald_wherego')) echo_ald_wherego(); ?>.
ChangeLog
1.6
- New: Redesigned admin interface
- New: More thumbnail options available including using timthumb to resize images
- New: Posts list is wrapped in a new class
wherego_relatedwhich should be the primary method to style the list - New: Option to add
nofollowto links - New: Option to open links in new window
- New: Limit the length of the title in the posts list
- New: Custom styles tab to quickly add CSS to style the output
- New: More display options. You can now choose to display the list of visited posts on home and archive pages
- New: Separate feed settings
- New: Option to exclude display of visited posts on select post/page IDs
- New: Option to exclude certain posts/page IDs from the visited posts
- Fixed: Plugin will no longer display Ajax error
- Fixed: Plugin will now work without errors with
WP_DEBUGset to TRUE
Read previous entries in the changelog.
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:
- Belarusian by Web Hosting Geeks
- Dutch by WPwebshop
- Italian by Gianni
- Latvia by Johannes Rau
- Russian by Artem
If you would like to make available a translation for the plugin, please do drop me an email.
Downloads
Download Where did they go from here?
Number of downloads: 21,258
Last updated: May 5, 2013
Page on WP Extend
Thanks for this. At this stage it just shows N/A. I think it will take a while before it shows anything.
A quick question:
Does it track the admin clicks?
As of now it does track Admin clicks. I’ll put in a check.
And, it will take a while to populate the table.
Ajay,
How do we omitt ‘N/A’, because it looks odd to see N/A for no post(s).
Thanks,
Sorry! for double comment, I missed “can we omitt enitre block including heading, when no post(s) are available?
As of now you can’t but, I think I can work out something for the next version. Let me run some tests.
Thanks for this cool plugin. This would work very well, especially if you have a large enough blog. If your blog only have a few posts, then it’s going to list down pretty much everything that’s on your blog
.
Does it track repeated clicks by the same person as just ONE click or multiple clicks? Just thinking that tracking it as multiple clicks would skew the results of this…
Every click is tracked.
Ajay,
It’s been some day, even now, the plugin is not populating the list. All it shows ‘N/A’. Any guesses, what’s wrong?
Can you check if you have
wp_headandwp_footercalls in your template?Same issue as DG describes. Although having it installed the plugin for a couple of days now, all i can see ist N/A.
I would love to see it work, sinse it provides very usefull links for the users. Yes wp_head and wp_footer is included in my template. Any Ideas?
Which blog are you running the plugin?
Can you edit a post you feel that visitors have moved to and see if the custom meta fields has and updated ids?
Thank you for the feedback. It
I’m not sure if this is a problem with 2.6.5.
Can you add
add_action('wp_footer','test_footer');function test_footer() { echo 'This is in the footer'; }
to the plugin file and see if it appears in the footer?
It’s still not working, and I don’t see new meta ids. I’m running WordPress 2.7, do you think, it has anything to with it?
Email me at me AT ajaydsouza DOT com the header.php and footer.php of your theme.
Hi Ajay: Yep, “This is in the footer” is shown in the footer after adding your code. Seems that this code snippet ist called correct by the theme. But still no populated custom fields. And: no caching plugin on this blog.
I think you got mixed up with your comment threading an the last reply to Hikari goes here
. Yes, I got an error.log file. But it refers to my whole site, which has almost 6 Mio PI/month. That makes it to big to view it directly on my server. If you don
My cPanel installation usually generates a separate error_log in each folder depending on the script. If this isn’t the case for you, then like you said there will be a lot of checking to do.
Can you run the test on another blog to see if it tracks there?
Yep, I
Might be a plugin conflict. I got it running on another 2.6.5 Blog. WP version does not seem to be the problem. Leaves the plugins which I have a whole load on my other blog and which I won
So, it is working perfectly on 2.6.5? If you do figure out which plugin, let me know please.
Hello! I added your plugin a few weeks ago and up until now no post is being tracked yet, all of them keep saying N/A.
I also added a Related Posts plugin and since then I’ve noticed that ppl are browsing my blog and visibly visting posts linked by that plugin from the original post, but even with that your plugin keeps reporting N/A…
How can I make it work?
Can you check for the wp_head and wp_footer calls in your theme?
Also, do you have any caching plugin?
The plugins are working perfectly both here and on Techtites.
Must admit that I am totally stumped that it hasn’t appeared on a single post
I’m wondering if it could be because of 2.6.5.
Can you check if there is an error_log generated on your site and if there are any references to the plugin?
Running this plugin on 2.7 with no caching and no other plugins. I also have N/A showing with no other output. wp_head and wp_footer is in my theme files. Guessing from the similar findings here, I think there may be a little bug here?? Please try and fix, this is such a useful feature. Thanks.
I guess one thing could be that the Referrer is being blocked.
Am going to brainstorm to see if I can find a better solution.
Thanks Ajay, I look forward to seeing a working version of this.
Any idea of a timescale with this? I just need to make decission on a production site quite soon. Thanks-really want to use this plugin…
I honestly am not sure of the timeline. I’ve put this to work on a few blogs on different servers and things work fine.
I’m working on an easy way to display list of “followed” posts in the admin area.
I’ll try to get a release out in a week with these updates.
Ok, thanks for the update.
You should see a release today
I believe this should track better than before.
List of related posts will also appear on Edit pages in WP-Admin
Hi,
I could not figure out, which plugin was colliding with yours, so I hopefully get it to work with the new release announced from you above. Thanks for your engagement.
great job on this plugin Ajay
Hi Ajay. I have the latest versio on my site. So far I can see no output at all and nothing in the admin edit pages. How can I tell that the plugin is working? or not … Thanks.
Do you see the extra column in the Edit posts screen?
Try browsing through your site from post to post for this and see if it gets updated.
I just checked your blog. The plugin appears to be working perfectly. The only explanation could be that something is blogging referrers.
Ok,I have just seen my first result. http://littlegreenblog.com/green-tips/ethical-consumerism/chocolate-week/ and yes, I have now found the extra column in the post edit page with some figures showing. Thanks for the hint. I just need to style the output now.
Great! so, the plugin works now. Glad this was resolved. Do, blog and spread the word about it
Great job in v1.1, tnx!!
I love this plugin and have been recommending it to people. However, I realized today that it conflicts with Clean Archives Reloaded (a plugin I can’t do without). What happens is that the page fails to load when both plugins are working on that one page (not a sidebar).
Is there an easy way to stop your plugin from displaying just one one page? I couldn’t quite figure that out from the instructions.
Thanks!
What is the exact problem that you face? Any particular error message?
One easy way is to make a page template and put the template tag for clean archives in it WITHOUT the template for where-go I did this on my site and the 2 plugins work happily. there will be other ways to stop the 2 plugins fighting…
Hi, thanks for this plugin, the idea is great!
I have installed it in my blog, which I am still working on, but it seems to ouput nothing on the page. I can see the extra column in the Admin area, but it only shows “N/A” regardless of my surfing from post to post. On the blog instead nothing is shown at all.
I am using WordPress 2.7.1 with Thesis theme.
Is there something I can try?
I really like this idea.
This is quite common when you first activate the plugin. It needs to gather data from referrers and if your site is not very busy this can take some time. I’ve installed it on some sites and it always works, but can take a few days. Just make sure you can see the template in the page source code.
I just installed the plugin and now when I go to any post on my site, I get a little box that says “Ajax error.” You can just click OK and it goes away, but it’s annoying. Any ideas?
Anything new on this? I am using an apache reverse proxy to access my wordpress site and I get this error on the home page. Disabling your plug in gets rid of the error pop up.
Anything particular I should look at?
Thanks
Dimitris, I’m not sure what you mean by using an “apache reverse proxy”
Hello Ajay
My wordpress site is hosted on a remote server and I am using a local server to redirect requests to it. So requests to mywordpresssite.com are redirected to remoteserver.com where the site content actually resides.
The problem seems to be that the ajax request from the plugin (I assume to update the pages visited database?) is not being re-directed properly. So it is looking on my local server and failing to find anything.
Hope this makes sense and thanks again
Came to your blog after a long time and really love your new theme.
Does this plugin use Ajax to update the data? Otherwise it won’t work with any caching plugins / software in place. Let me know if you have plans for this.
Take care…
Thanks for stopping by
The plugin uses Ajax to track the posts. So, it is perfectly compatible with any caching plugin. I have WP-Super Cache on this blog as well as Techtites
I installed and it’s not showing up … I’m using wp2.7.1
Just installed ” Where did they go from here? ” at theskykid.com and am curious to find out its impact on the blog. Thank you for creating this plugin. Will get back when I could provide some more feedback
Such a bummer: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-where-did-they-go-from-here-bad-error-upon-plugin-deletion?replies=2
Please fix.
Is it possible, that the Plugin does not correctly works, if a User read a Page after reading an Article.
On my Blog the Plugin shows the Text which i have registered under ‘Output Options’ -> ‘Title of Posts’, but i have activates the Option ‘Exclude pages from the post list’
Hence, appears the given text, although none of the other articles was read.
How I can adapt the function in such a way which only appears the text if really also an article was read
Marcus, am not sure what the question is. On a post, the plugin only displays other posts that the user clicked to visit from the current post, either through a list of related posts, or from the sidebar, etc.
Exclude pages from the post list will not display any pages in this list of posts. However, it will still record these hits.