Description
WordPress has no built-in widget for popular posts. This plugin adds one.
The widget lists published posts ordered by the number of comments they received, so the posts your readers talked about most appear first. Each entry shows the featured image, the post title, the publication date and the comment count.
The widget can be placed in any widget area your theme provides, for example a sidebar or a footer.
What it does
- Adds one widget called “inventivo: Popular Posts”.
- Lets you set a title and the number of posts to show, between 1 and 20.
- Orders posts by comment count, highest first.
- Shows the featured image only when the post has one.
- Loads its stylesheet only on pages where the widget is actually rendered.
What it does not do
- No tracking of page views, and no visitor data is collected or stored.
- No connection to any external service.
- No settings page, no database tables, no scheduled tasks.
- No JavaScript in the frontend.
Ordering
“Popular” here means “most commented”. The plugin deliberately does not count page views, because counting views requires either tracking visitors or an external service, and this plugin does neither.
Installation
- Install the plugin through the Plugins screen in WordPress, or upload the folder
popular-posts-inventivoto/wp-content/plugins/. - Activate the plugin through the Plugins screen.
- Go to Appearance, then Widgets, and add “inventivo: Popular Posts” to a widget area.
FAQ
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Can I order posts by page views instead of comments?
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No. Counting page views would mean tracking visitors or relying on an external service. This plugin does neither, so it orders by comment count.
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Why do some posts have no image?
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The image is the featured image of the post. Posts without a featured image are shown without one, and the text takes the full width.
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Does the widget work in a block theme?
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Yes, in any widget area the theme registers. Block themes that do not register classic widget areas do not show classic widgets at all, which is a property of the theme and not of this plugin.
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Does the plugin load anything from an external server?
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No. The stylesheet is served from your own installation, and no requests leave your site.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“Popular Posts | inventivo” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “Popular Posts | inventivo” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.0.1
- The plugin URI and the author URI are now different addresses, as required by the directory.
1.0.0
- First release in the plugin directory.
- Rewritten from the ground up: all output is escaped, all input is sanitized and range checked.
- Fixed a bug where an invalid number of posts was not stored correctly.
- The stylesheet is now versioned and only loaded when the widget is rendered.
- Removed a dependency on an icon font that was not part of the plugin.