Nick Adams

Revault Media

This easy to use WordPress plugin is designed to add a new feature for theme developers. Used on many of my own websites as well as those of my clients, the plugin allows me to quickly add a collection of popular posts to any theme element.
The plugin can easily be used by website owners as a WordPress Widget, adding lists of posts to the Sidebar of a WordPress website.
<h4>About the plugin</h4>
More advanced users can also call the functionality of the plugin from a WordPress shortcode by adding the code <code>[thisismyurl_easy_popular_posts]</code> to any Post or Page within WordPress.
Finally, theme authors may also take advantage of the plugin by calling the functionality directly from theme files with the code <code>thisismyurl_easy_popular_posts();</code>.
This plugin was originally authored by Christopher Ross.
Questions about this plugin can be posted to the WordPress.org forums at https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-popular-posts/, or to the Issues tab at the GitHub https://github.com/thisismyurl/easy-popular-posts repository for the plugin.
This plugin is currently available in:
<ul>
<li>English</li>
<li>French</li>
<li>German</li>
</ul>
<h3>Updates</h3>
Updates to this plugin will be posted to the GitHub repository for testing prior to updates on WordPress.org, if you’d like to help make this plugin better please consider taking part in regular code reviews of releases at the GitHub repository.
<h3>Donations</h3>
Open source software such as this free WordPress plugin only work through the hard work of community members, volunteering their time or resources to make the software freely available. If you would like to show your support for this software, please consider donating towards the development effort.
If you can’t contribute to the plugin in any other way, please consider translating it to your local language.

Easy Popular Posts

An easy to use WordPress function to add popular posts to any theme.

Bill Erickson

This is a helper plugin to allow you to build WordPress queries using WordPress.com stats.
This plugin uses the WordPress.com stats (packaged in Jetpack) to find out your most popular posts. You must be running Jetpack for this plugin to work. I recommend running Jetpack for at least 30 days to get useful data.
It asks for the 100 most popular posts over the past 30 days. This includes both posts and pages, since their stats don’t let you filter based on post type. I filter this list down to just posts and then store its ranking as post meta (‘be_stats’).
You can <a href="https://gist.github.com/billerickson/4997202" rel="nofollow ugc">write custom queries</a> to list popular posts, or use the <a href="https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/display-posts-shortcode/" rel="ugc">Display Posts Shortcode plugin</a> to do it for you. Examples using the shortcode plugin:
[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”
<h3>For Developers</h3>
There are a few filters available to you for customization. Refer to the plugin’s code for more information.
be_stats_args – arguments passed to WordPress.com Stats API. 
Default: array( ‘days’ => 30, ‘limit’ => 100 ) 
Example: http://www.billerickson.net/code/customize-be-stats-arguments/
be_stats_update – Conditional for determining if stats data should be saved 
Default: ‘post’ == get_post_type() 
Example: http://www.billerickson.net/code/be-stats-change-ranking-conditions/

BE Stats

Keeps track of your most popular posts for display in site

Easy Popular Posts vs BE Stats