Display trending / popular posts

General
1

Hi everyone,

Does anyone know how to set up and display trending or popular posts on a WordPress theme with Pinegrow? I did a few google searches but can’t seem to find any tutorials?

Kind regards
Jason Lodder

2

How proficient are you with PHP? Fetching and displaying the posts with a custom loop is easy from within PG, but you will have to write a small function within your theme “functions.php” or you can choose to add it in a custom plugin.
Bob

3

Hi RobM,

I have done follow along and a very basic level of PHP in Codecademy. I would like to look at the option of adding it into the functions.php. Do you have any follow examples of this?

Thank you in advanced
Jason Lodder

4

There are a few tutorials out there on the internet. The simplest version is to add a function that alters the post meta everytime the post is accessed. Note: this method will get fooled if you have a look ahead cache, or something that pre-fetches the article. Note, you should add this to the “inc/custom.php” file in your Pinegrow project, that way your theme will export correctly.

function count_post_visits()
{
	if (is_single()) {
		global $post;
		$views = $post->my_post_views;
		if ($views == '') {
			update_post_meta($post->ID, 'my_post_views', '1');
		} else {
			$views_no = intval($views);
			update_post_meta($post->ID, 'my_post_views', ++$views_no);
		}
	}
}
add_action('wp_head', 'count_post_visits);

So, this function fires if the user navigates to a post page as determined by is_single(). Note that this will also fire for pages and attachments - you can change this as desired.
Then it grabs the global $post variable.
$views = $post->my_post_views;
From that it checks to see if that post has the metadata named 'my_post_views' and what the value of the metadata is. If it doesn’t exist it will be created and an empty string will be returned.

			update_post_meta($post->ID, 'my_post_views', '1');

If that happens, the function will update the metadata with a value of 1

$views_no = intval($views);
update_post_meta($post->ID, 'my_post_views', ++$views_no);

else it will assign the current data to the $views_no variable and then update the post metadata with that number plus 1.

add_action('wp_head', 'count_post_visits);

Finally, we add our function to the ‘wp_head’ hook.

Back in Pinegrow we have to set up a loop and a potentially a display of our page views. You can figure out your best use, but I set the loop up on an article. So, with the article selected I selected “The Loop” from the WordPress actions.

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Within the loop I set some basic items - you can change these to suit yourself.
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The Order by has to be “meta_value_num”
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If you choose to change your metadata name you should also change it here.

So, that is it for the loop. Next to show the page views.

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I added an <h5> with a span. For the span I added a ‘Post Field - Smart’ action.
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The I picked the metadata I wanted to display - again if you change the name, change what you enter here.
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This results in the following code:
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If you need anything explained further, just reach out. Note- this function will favor older posts. You could change the function to also store a date and make you loop a little more complicated to also filter the posts by when it was last viewed. I think - but I’m not an expert - that you have to hand-edit the loop args in their own php block in order to sort by more than one metadata value.

Cheers,
Bob

5

How about using “Popular” post plugin and using Shortcodes? Not sure it will work fine with PG but…