Displaying Popular Posts using BE-Stats

Jetpack is a great plugin for collecting stats on your posts. But the only frontend display of that data they provide is the Top Pages and Posts widget. What if you want to filter that down to a more refined list?

BE Stats is the plugin for you. It asks for the 100 most popular posts over the past 30 days. I filter this list down to just posts and then store its ranking as post meta (‘be_stats’).

See it in use here: http://www.billerickson.net/popular/

Download BE-Stats from WordPress.rog

You can then write custom queries using that metadata, or use the Display Posts Shortcode which makes it even easier.

Here’s some examples using the shortcode:

[display-posts orderby="popular"]
Lists the 10 most popular posts
[display-posts orderby="popular" posts_per_page="4"]
Lists the 4 most popular posts
[display-posts orderby="popular" posts_per_page="4" tag="basic"]
Lists the 4 most popular posts tagged “basic”

I developed this for a recent client project (still under development, will share link once it is live). The website is a news site that releases a lot of content. On the home and category archives they wanted to display recent posts and popular posts from that section. Here’s what I placed where I want popular posts:

<?php // Popular Posts $args = array( 'meta_key' => 'be_stats', 'orderby' => 'meta_value_num', 'order' => 'ASC', 'posts_per_page' => 3, 'cat' => get_query_var( 'cat' ), 'post__not_in' => $used_posts, ); $loop = new WP_Query( $args ); if( $loop->have_posts() ): echo '<div class="popular-posts-listing">'; echo '<h4>Most Popular ' . $category->name . ' Posts</h4>'; while( $loop->have_posts() ): $loop->the_post(); echo '<div class="post">'; if( has_post_thumbnail() ) echo '<a href="' . get_permalink() . '">' . be_get_post_thumbnail( null, 134, 134, true ) . '</a>'; echo '<h2><a href="' . get_permalink() . '">' . get_the_title() . '</a></h2>'; echo wpautop( get_the_excerpt() . '…' ); echo '<p class="more"><a href="' . get_permalink() . '" class="square-button">MORE</a></p>'; echo '</div>'; endwhile; echo '</div>'; endif; wp_reset_postdata();

There’s also some filters for you to customize how the plugin works.

be_stats_args – Controls what arguments are passed to WordPress.com Stats API. Example:

<?php /** * Customize BE Stats Arguments * This will limit it to 7 days of pageviews (default is 30) and 20 posts (default is 100) * * @author Bill Erickson * @link http://www.billerickson.net/code/customize-be-stats-arguments * * @param array $args * @return array $args */ function be_customize_stats_args( $args ) { $args['days'] = 7; $args['limit'] = 20; return $args; } add_filter( 'be_stats_args', 'be_customize_stats_args' );

be_stats_update – Conditional for determining if stats data should be saved Examples:

<?php // Save all stats data, don't limit it to just posts add_filter( 'be_stats_update', '__return_true' ); // -- OR -- /** * Limit Stats to Events * */ function be_stats_for_events( $update, $id ) { return 'events' == get_post_type( $id ); } add_filter( 'be_stats_update', 'be_stats_for_events', 10, 2 );

Hopefully some other developers will find a use for this.

2 Comments

Richard Buff says:
February 26, 2013 at 10:36 am
This is great stuff, Bill. A little off-topic, but I can’t help but wonder: Jetpack has a bunch of available features. Which ones do you actually use on projects other than the stats?
- Bill Erickson says:
  February 26, 2013 at 10:39 am
  I disable everything but Stats, Notifications, Subscriptions, Spelling and Grammar, Custom CSS, and Extra Sidebar Widgets.
  I also install Manual Control for Jetpack so that when new modules come out they aren’t auto-updated.

Blog

Displaying Popular Posts using BE-Stats

Like this:

2 Comments

Join the Conversation Cancel reply

My Story

Receive Posts via Email

WordPress Bookmarks

Recent Blog Posts

Latest Tweets

My Contributions