Wordpress - List your most popular Posts

Submitted by rcastera on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 11:22

This function below creates a list of links of the top commented posts on your Wordpress blog. It builds this list based on the posts that have the most comments. Place it in your footer or sidebar item!

<?php
function listPopularPosts() {
    global $wpdb;
    $strBuidler = '';
	
    $result = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT comment_count, ID, post_title FROM $wpdb->posts ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 0 , 5");
	
    foreach ($result as $post) {
	setup_postdata($post);
	$postId = $post->ID;
	$title = $post->post_title;
	$commentCount = $post->comment_count;
		
	if ($commentCount != 0) {
		$strBuidler .= '<li>';
		$strBuidler .= '<a href="' . get_permalink($postId) . '" title="' . $title . '">' . $title . '</a> ';
		$strBuidler .= '(' . $commentCount . ')';
		$strBuidler .= '</li>';
	}
    }	
	
    return $strBuidler;
}
?>

Call the function in your sidebar of footer like this:

<h2><?php _e('Popular Posts'); ?></h2>
<ul>
	<?php echo(listPopularPosts()); ?>
</ul>

15 comments for Wordpress - List your most popular Posts

Awesome post...

Posted by Cory Lankin on 05/17/2009.

Awesome post

This works well. How would...

Posted by Loren on 05/19/2009.

This works well. How would you limit the output to the 5 or 10 most commented?

Hello Loren, You can easily...

Posted by Richard on 05/19/2009.

Hello Loren,

You can easily change the number listed by changing the value in the SQL Statement. So, below where it says "LIMIT 0 , 5" at the end of the statement, you would change 5 to the number desired.

$result = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT comment_count, ID, post_title FROM $wpdb->posts ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 0 , 5");

It seems as though that if...

Posted by chaz on 06/21/2009.

It seems as though that if you had a lot of posts that your script would have to query the whole DB to find just the top 5 most actively discussed.

1. Wouldn't it be better to change the query to limit to the last 60 days so that not only would you only have the more relevant articles but also so you don't have to query the whole DB? Or would you still have to query the db anyway?

2. Ideally, it would be nice to set this up to rebuild as a cron job once per day and just include what is built by the daily job... no? Do wordpress offer anything like that? For instance, why build the category list every single time the page is hit when mine hasn't changed in the last 6 months.

Hello Chaz, You are correct...

Posted by Richard on 06/28/2009.

Hello Chaz,

You are correct in stating that it queries the whole database. If you wanted to limit so that it queries a specified date range, that’s possible as well. Cheers!

What if you want to display...

Posted by chaz on 06/21/2009.

What if you want to display them on the main page in the loop instead of the sidebar? It seems as though this only works in the disbar.

Hello Chaz, This works on the...

Posted by Richard on 06/28/2009.

Hello Chaz,

This works on the home/main page as well.

hi Richard Great code, thanks...

Posted by david knight on 06/29/2009.

hi Richard
Great code, thanks for that. One question if that's ok. How would you add more details to the list? Id love to be able to add more of the content, perhaps even categories. Is this possible? Thanks again for the code!

Hey David, Thanks for your...

Posted by Richard on 07/04/2009.

Hey David,

Thanks for your comments! You can definitely add more content. You just need to change the SQL Query. For example, the query below will pull the content for the post as well!



$result = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT comment_count, ID, post_title, post_content FROM $wpdb->posts ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 0 , 5");

I've been around the web and...

Posted by Mark on 10/03/2010.

I've been around the web and around the web some more and it seems everyone is doing a great job at building this function.

However something that is missing is a tutorial on how to get it to display like the normal post loop that everyone has on their homepage or category pages.

This only shows a list of the titles with links.

Can you do a tutorial on how to display like that?

I'm betting it will be immensely popular if you do.

Speak soon hopefully.

Mark

hi, Just found this and its...

Posted by Ajay on 11/09/2010.

hi,

Just found this and its exactly what I'm after.

Is there any way of assigning a different class to each so that i can use a different font size for each?

Thanks Richard for the...

Posted by Abhishek Dwivedi on 12/30/2010.

Thanks Richard for the interesting tip. I was almost stuck fetching the permalink for my post. Your code helped !!

-Abhi