How to show Popular Posts on a Texpattern site

Posted on 12 March 2012 by Clive Walker in Textpattern

I wrote this post a while back. The content can still be relevant but the information I've linked to may not be available.

I wanted to add my most popular posts (as measured by visitor logs) to this Textpattern site and display them. After searching through the Textpattern forums, it seemed that several plug-ins were available but most of these were now defunct. Until I came across the smd_lately plug-in by Stef Dawson. You can use it in a variety of different ways but, for me, I want to show the most popular posts over the last month. A 'rolling' total if you like.

The plugin code I used for this is:

<txp:smd_lately by="" sort="popularity" 
         wraptag="ul" break="li" limit="10" within="1 month" />

I've used the plug-in on this site. It worked great.

PS: Make sure you are using the cache_time attribute with the plug-in to avoid heavy database use; this will speed up page load times. See this forum thread for details.

Update: This plug-in is not is use on the site any more because I wanted to put something else in its place.