[Plugin: WordPress Popular Posts] Sorry. No Data So Far.

Okay, let me clarify here. I have already changed the time to ALL and the setting to COMMENTS. Will it only give top posts based on comments from now on, or read all previous comments and give me some posts in the list? I have read the site and can’t see why mine is still not showing anything.

Is there some way to hide it until it starts listing posts?

Hi there,

It’ll start collecting data from the time you activated my plugin, but it’ll show how many comments each post has gotten so far.

You can safely remove the widget from your sidebar – as long as you keep it active, my plugin will continue to register each visit and gather info about your most popular posts.

Thank you for writing. It did come up with three posts, but these are sorted according to page views not comments. I know this because two of them have no comments and one was recommended by a magazine. I noticed it took time to get the three posts. Actually when it finally retrieved them, I had already switched it to sort posts by comments, now about 10 hours ago. Does it take a while to read through the whole blog and find the posts with the most comments? Will it pull posts from all-time as I have it set, or just from the last 30 days? Is there any way to modify the plugin to select BOTH posts with the most comments and the most views? Any suggestions of how I could manually add to the list a post that I know is popular. I appreciate your time. Thanks for reading and for writing this plugin. Seems like this sort of feature might be built in to the platform by now.

No, it doesn’t work that way. Let me explain myself a bit better.

What my plugin does is that each time your posts/pages get a view from your visitors, WordPress Popular posts will register that event in its cache table. So, posts that have not been viewed yet since my plugin was installed won’t show up on the list until someone does.

When you decide to sort posts by comments, for example, my plugin will look into its cache table and retrieve all posts in there with the most comments and sort them accordingly.

Eventually your most popular posts will climb up into the top since search engines and other sites are linking to them, so I wouldn’t worry about what my plugin is showing now. Give it a few days and you’ll start seeing different results.

As I said before, you can remove the widget from your sidebar for now too. My plugin will keep caching posts and building its cache with your most viewed posts. Then, after a week or two (whatever you decide) you can put back WordPress Popular Posts widget on your sidebar and let people know what are your best posts.

Thanks for your kind words about my plugin. I do hope to see it merging with WordPress’ platform someday as I believe it’s a useful feature that every blog should have.

Thank you. What I also am asking is, how long does it take to show top posts by comments after I switch to comments? I changed it to sort by comments two days ago now and it is still listing posts that have 0 comments. Did I read somewhere that a blog can install your plugin in two different places in the sidebar? In that way I could have one set to retrieve top posts by hits and one by comments. Would that work?

Yup, as long as your theme is widget-ready you can use multiple instances of my plugin. You could, as you said, have a Popular Posts listing sorted by views, and another listing sorted by comments.

I think you’re still a bit confused about the sorting option. When you ask my plugin to sort popular posts by comments, it’ll look for the most viewed posts of your blog, and then will order them by comments. If a post has no comments, but has got lots of views, it’ll still show up in the list (though it’ll be pushed down if a post has got more views and more comments than it).

Hope that clarifies things a bit more.

Okay, now I begin to understand it better. I never did take it out of the sidebar because I have been intrigued by its changing contents every time I have logged on. It now has a full list of 10 posts, which happen to be 9 of the 10 posts that are displayed on my home page, and one other popular post. Is there any way I can manually add or otherwise get it to list the posts that were popular before I added the plugin? It sure would be nice if it listed other posts besides those on my home page. That is the whole purpose of it in the first place, to draw attention to older posts that were well-appreciated.

I understand, however there’s no way you can add it without having to modify the data tables. You could try and insert them directly on the wp_popularpostsdata table, but I consider that innecesary. As I said before, if these posts are really that popular your visitors will find them and WPP will automatically insert them. Eventually these will get into the top of the ranking.

It is working great now. Has all the best posts in the top 10. I guess it just took some time for more people to click on them. Interesting that the ones that were popular before remained so. Thank you. Great and important addition to the site.

Also cool that you attend to making sure users are happy.

See? I told you ??

And thank you for your kind words. I try to do my best to make my plugin as useful as possible, and your feedback only helps me to get there.

Thanks!

I’m not getting anything, either. Just “Sorry. No data so far.” Do I have to wait a while or something? I have the “php wp_head” code already in my header.php file.

Hi dcloud,

Got a few questions for you so I can assist you the best way possible:

# What’s your site URL?
# Is your wp-admin folder password protected via htaccess?
# Are your visitors required to register in order to access your posts?
# Is this how your wp_head code looks like?

<?php wp_head(); ?>

# What’s your site URL? – https://dougdraws.com

# Is your wp-admin folder password protected via htaccess? – I don’t even know what this means

# Are your visitors required to register in order to access your posts? – No, I have it set to ‘Comment author must fill out name and e-mail’ and that’s it

# Is this how your wp_head code looks like? – This code is already in the header.php file