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1. Daedalon
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   I'm thinking of adding in Top 10 the option for displaying random posts in Top 10. I haven't found a single plugin that would do this sensibly in the sidebar, and after the other patches Top 10 is simply awesome for our purposes. The implementation I have in mind would allow the following settings:

   __ Number of most popular posts to show
   __ Number of random posts to show after the most popular ones

   Ajay: Would this make sense to incorporate in the main branch?

   The other option I had in mind is to use Better Related, but that requires more patching. It doesn't yet support thumbnails or widgets although it provides an option for manual placing. Another issue is that it hasn't been updated in a year, so it may take a long while before the patch is incorporated in the main branch. I'll likely make these patches for Better Related at some point in any case, but it may take a while and other users might love to have the feature in Top 10 as well.

   http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/top-10/

2. Ajay
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   Daedalon, are you talking of truely random posts? I wouldn't consider this to be a major "core" requirement for users, because you lose the purpose of displaying the top posts only.
   But, I am open to other users if they would like this feature.

   My plugin Contextual Related Posts displays the related posts for the current post that the reader is on.

3. Daedalon
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   Yes, truly random ones to help users discover even the less inter-connected posts.

   I'll have a look into that plugin soon. Thanks!

4. Daedalon
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   Gave it a quick try. Had originally skipped it and ended up with Better Related instead when was looking for a related posts plugin, as the video site I run has very little text in the posts and Better Related supports categories, tags and custom taxonomies well beside the titles and content.

   The automatical placement options didn't bring any result with my customized Photog theme. Didn't see an option for widget placing either. It also seems that this would benefit from some of the patches I contributed to Top 10 to support the Video Thumbnails' images, to make sure the max-width and height are treated accordingly etc.

   You're likely already on your way to adding these so I'll look forward to give the next version a go.

   Since you have at least two plugins using having a very similar options screen, it springs to mind that they could share some code. In Drupal it's common to have an API module and then other modules that call it. Would it simplify developing these modules if you'd have only one core to update instead of making the same changes multiple times?

5. Daedalon
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   Oh, and also found it curious that the plugin didn't add a link to its settings in the Settings menu, so they were only accessible through the plugin list.

6. Ajay
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   It should add a menu called "Related Posts".

   Regarding the API, I had given this some thought. I can dump the information into a separate file, but it increases the need for multiple php includes.
   Will need to see how best I can go about implementing this.

   Normally, its a copy paste followed by a find and replace, which is a few minute job.

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