Popularity Contest Couldn’t Be Activated? Get Fixed!

Display­ing your most pop­u­lar posts is an excel­lent way to draw your read­ers into your blog to oth­er posts proven to be enjoyed by oth­er readers.

And with Word­Press, it seems like there are two pri­ma­ry ways to deter­mine which posts should be con­sid­ered pop­u­lar: the num­ber of hits that they get or the num­ber of com­ments that they get.

Some plu­g­ins list the posts which are com­mend­ed upon the most. Oth­ers keep track of vis­its (or tie in to a stats plu­g­in) to deter­mine the most popular.

While those ways are good, they each only take into account part of the pic­ture; after all, is not a post’s pop­u­lar­i­ty deter­mined both by com­ments & vis­its?

Enter Pop­u­lar­i­ty Con­test, a won­der­ful lit­tle Word­Press plu­g­in which — through plen­ty of math­e­mat­i­cal voodoo — tracks a page’s pop­u­lar­i­ty based on direct vis­its, views on the home page or with­in an archive, views in a feed, and com­ments, Track­Backs, and PingBacks.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, using Pop­u­lar­i­ty Con­test on more recent ver­sions of Word­Press has been made a bit more dif­fi­cult by the fact that the two are incompatible.

When acti­vat­ing Pop­u­lar­i­ty Con­test here, I was met with a very unhelp­ful mes­sage about the plu­g­in not being able to be acti­vat­ed due to a fatal error.

A cou­ple of mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the Pop­u­lar­i­ty Con­test 1.3b3 file had to be made to get it to work. You can down­load the mod­i­fied Pop­u­lar­i­ty Con­test file if you would like, or you can make the changes yourself.

If you pre­fer to down­load the plu­g­in file from Alex King’s site, you’ll need to make these mod­i­fi­ca­tions to it using a basic text or code edi­tor (not a rich text editor):

• Find:

  require('../../wp-blog-header.php');

• Replace with:

  @require('../wp-blog-header.php');

• Find:

  if (isset($_GET['activate']) && $_GET['activate'] == 'true') {

• Replace with:

  if (isset($_GET['action']) && $_GET['action'] == 'activate') {

After sav­ing the mod­i­fied popularity_contest.php file (or extract­ing the file from the archive you down­loaded from here), upload it to your wp-content/plugins/ fold­er and acti­vate it in the Plu­g­ins pan­el of your blog.

Works like a treat, no?