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Top 10 – Popular posts plugin for WordPress

By Ajay D'Souza

Description

WordPress doesn’t have an in-built system to track page views or displaying popular posts. Top 10 is an easy to use, yet, powerful WordPress plugin that will count the number of page views of your posts, pages and any custom post types. You can then display the page view counts as well as display your most popular posts.

Top 10 adds two widgets that you can use to display a list of popular posts and the counta cross all your blog posts.

Although several similar plugins exist today, Top 10 is one of the most feature-rich popular post plugins with support for thumbnails, shortcodes, widgets, custom post types and CSS styles. The inbuilt caching system also helps reduce server load by caching your popular posts output. The tracking uses ajax and is thus compatible with most popular caching plugins.

Top 10 also has powerful API and is fully extendable with WordPress actions and filters to allow you easily extend the code base to add new features or tweak existing ones.

Features

  • Page counter: Counts page views on single posts, pages and custom post types on an hourly basis which can then be easily displayed automatically, using shortcodes or functions
  • Popular posts: Display a list of popular posts either for total counts or for a custom period. You can choose how many posts are to be displayed along with loads of other customisation options
  • Gutenberg / Block Editor support: You can find a block called “Popular Posts [Top 10]” with its own configurable set of options
  • Widget ready: Sidebar widgets available for daily popular and overall popular posts. Highly customizable widgets to control what you want to display in the list of posts
  • Shortcodes: The plugin includes two shortcodes [tptn_list] and [tptn_views] to display the posts list and the number of views respectively
  • Thumbnail support
    • Support for WordPress post thumbnails. Top 10 will create a custom image size (tptn_thumbnail) with the dimensions specified in the Settings page
    • Auto-extract the first image in your post to be displayed as a thumbnail
    • Manually enter the URL of the thumbnail via WordPress meta fields. Specify this using the meta box in your Edit screens.
  • Exclusions: Exclude posts from select categories from appearing in the top posts list. Also exclude posts by ID from appearing in the list
  • Styles: The output is wrapped in CSS classes which allows you to easily style the list. You can enter your custom CSS styles from within WordPress Admin area or use the style included.
  • Admin interface: View list of daily and/or overall popular posts from within the dashboard. Top 10 also adds two sortable columns to your All Posts and All Pages pages in your WordPress Admin area
  • Export/Import interface: Export the count tables and settings to restore in the same site or on other installs
  • Works with caching plugins like WP-Super-Cache, W3 Total Cache or Quick Cache
  • Extendable code: Top 10 has tonnes of filters and actions that allow any developer to easily add features, edit outputs, etc.

GDPR

Top 10 is GDPR compliant as it doesn’t collect any personal data about your visitors when installed out of the box. You can see the data the plugin stores in the wp_top_ten and wp_top_ten_daily tables in the database. Note: the prefix wp might be different if you have changed it from the default.

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ENSURING THAT ALL GDPR REQUIREMENTS ARE MET ON YOUR WEBSITE.

Donations

I spend a significant amount of my free time maintaining, updating and more importantly supporting this plugin. If you have been using this plugin and find this useful, do consider making a donation. This helps me pay for my hosting and domains.

Translations

Top 10 is available for translation directly on WordPress.org. Check out the official Translator Handbook to contribute.

Contribute

Top 10 is also available on Github
So, if you’ve got some cool feature that you’d like to implement into the plugin or a bug you’ve been able to fix, consider forking the project and sending me a pull request. Please don’t use that for support requests.

Screenshots

  • Top 10 options - General options
  • Top 10 options - Counter and Tracker options
  • Top 10 options - Popular post list options
  • Top 10 options - Thumbnail options
  • Top 10 options - Styles
  • Top 10 options - Maintenance
  • Top 10 options - Feed
  • Top 10 widget options
  • Top 10 Meta box on the Edit Post screen
  • Top 10 Tools page
  • Top 10 - Popular posts view in Admin
  • Top 10 Export/Import interface
  • Top 10 - Popular posts view in Network Admin

Blocks

This plugin provides 1 block.

  • Top 10 Popular Posts Display the Popular Posts

Installation

WordPress install (the easy way)

  1. Navigate to Plugins within your WordPress Admin Area

  2. Click “Add new” and in the search box enter “Top 10”

  3. Find the plugin in the list (usually the first result) and click “Install Now”

Manual install

  1. Download the top-10.zip file from this release post
  2. Visit Plugins in your Admin Area
  3. Hit the Add New button next to the Plugins heading
  4. Hit the Upload button next to the Add Plugins heading
  5. Select the top-10.zip file that you downloaded and hit Install Now
  6. Activate the Plugin in WP-Admin.
  7. Go to Top 10 » Settings to configure
  8. Go to Appearance » Widgets to add the Popular Posts sidebar widget to your theme
  9. Go to Top 10 » View Popular Posts to view the list of popular posts

FAQ

Check out the FAQ on the plugin page and the FAQ on the WebberZone knowledgebase.
It is the fastest way to get support as I monitor the forums regularly. I also provide paid premium support via email.

How can I customise the output?

Details on how to use and customize the output is in this knowledge base article

Shortcodes

You can find details of the shortcodes in this knowledge base article

Can this plugin replace Google Analytics?

No. Top 10 has been designed to only track the number of page-views on your blog posts and display the same. It isn’t designed to replace Google Analytics or any other full fledged analytics application.

How does the scheduled maintenance work?

When you enabled the scheduled maintenance, Top 10 will create a cron job that will run at a predefined interval and clean up old entries from the wp_top_ten_daily table.
Note: If you enable this option, WordPress will execute this job when it is scheduled the first time

How to make the columns on the Custom Post Type admin pages sortable?

Add the following code to your functions.php file of your theme.

add_filter( 'manage_edit-{$cpt}_sortable_columns', 'tptn_column_register_sortable' );

Replace {$cpt} by the slug of your custom post type. E.g. to make the columns on your ‘projects’ post type sortable, you will need to add:

add_filter( 'manage_edit-projects_sortable_columns', 'tptn_column_register_sortable' );

Reviews

As improved my page views and time on site

September 19, 2022
Using WordPress, I created a reusable block and add the most popular posts over the last 24 hours to the end of every news story (it's a news site). Since adding that feature, my page views and time on site have nearly doubled, it helps to present my readers with other posts that are relevant at the time. Even if someone finds a news article that is a few years old through a web search, at the end of the article it will display the most current trending stories to encourage people to keep reading. Works great. I recommend.

Good plugin

June 10, 2022 1 reply
Good plugin, good technical support. Congratulations to the author/authors. Cheers!

Good plugin and good service

May 25, 2021 1 reply
This plugin works well with paremeters useful, and good widgets also. The plugin is easy to install and configure. I'm not a developper and I really appreciated to receive fast support when needed, this is the case here. Big Thank you!

Great plugin, but a few hitches

May 11, 2021 2 replies
This does exactly what it promises and does it well. I have used it for the past four years and I've had little issue with it. The only complaint, small, is its CSS practices and a few inconsistencies. It uses several CSS properties with "!important" attributes which isn't exactly an efficient practice -- and ignored by frameworks like AMP that emphasise lean code (to clarify, the plugin author offers a good explanation for why he does that in their response below). Thumbnail options in the plugin settings also have no effects on thumbnails in widgets. I dequeued its stylesheet and added styles to a custom stylesheet, and they still apply with !important. Otherwise, it's the best plugin for what it does -- lean and efficient.
Read all 94 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Top 10 – Popular posts plugin for WordPress” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

“Top 10 – Popular posts plugin for WordPress” has been translated into 3 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “Top 10 – Popular posts plugin for WordPress” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

3.2.5

Release post: https://webberzone.com/blog/top-10-v3-2-0/

  • Two minor security fixes

3.2.4

  • Security fix when clearing the cache

3.2.3

  • Security fix in block

3.2.2

  • Enhancements/Modifications:

    • Dashboard widget will display the number of posts set in the Top 10 Settings page

  • Bug fixes:

    • Tax query parameter was not set in Top_Ten_Query
    • post_type parameter was not set in Top_Ten_Query
    • Parse error in some PHP installs prevented the plugin from being activated
    • Fixed missing stylesheet error when text_only style is selected
    • Only from categories option in the Widget now takes a comma-separated ID list only as the autocomplete was not compatible with the new widget interface

3.2.1

  • Enhancements/Modifications:

    • Modified behaviour of Popular Posts page and Admin Dashboard widgets to limit to public post types

  • Bug fixes:

    • Fixed: Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function restore_current_blog()

3.2.0

  • Features:

    • New setting in the Popular Posts block to select the style by block type

  • Multisite improvements:

    • Retrieve the popular posts across multiple blogs by passing multiple blog IDs to Top_Ten_Query
    • New Tools page and Import/Export page in Network Admin – you can find this in the Top 10 menu
    • Resetting the Popular Posts or Daily Popular Posts will apply to the current site in the Admin screen and across the network in the Network Admin screen
    • Exporting/Importing tables will apply to the current site in the Admin screen and across the network in the Network Admin screen

  • Top_Ten_Query improvements:

    • WP_Query’s arguments posts_per_page, post_type are prioritised
    • New filters: top_ten_query_date_query, top_ten_query_meta_query, top_ten_query_meta_query_relation, top_ten_query_tax_query_relation, top_ten_query_posts_fields, top_ten_query_posts_join, top_ten_query_posts_where, top_ten_query_posts_orderby, top_ten_query_posts_groupby
    • Cache key is generated from the query_args instead of just the input_query_args

  • Other Enhancements/Modifications:

    • New function: get_tptn_table(); Code has been refactored to use this function
    • Popular Posts page in Admin or Network Admin use the same class Top_Ten_Statistics_Table. Deleted Top_Ten_Network_Statistics_Table
    • Selecting “Text only” thumbnail setting or style will not display a thumbnail
    • Use moment.js bundled with WordPress
    • Updated ChartJS and ChartJS Data Labels plugin scripts to latest versions

  • Bug fix:

    • Scripts/styles didn’t load in Network posts page

3.1.3

Release post: https://webberzone.com/blog/top-10-v3-1-0/

  • Bug fixes:
    • Updated moment.min.js
    • Fixed PHP errors when editing a post in Gutenberg

3.1.2

  • Features:

    • New filter tptn_show_meta_box that can be set to false to disable the Top 10 meta box on Edit screens
    • New option to exclude the current post from the list
    • New option “Exclude on Categories” to disable the display of the popular posts on selected categories

  • Enhancements/Modifications:

    • Optimised import of tables particularly for larger imports
    • Added wpml-config.xml file that will allow settings to be translated with WPML and PolyLang
    • Upgraded block to the latest API
    • Upgraded thumbnail display. If default image is disabled, then the site icon will be displayed if available
    • Admin dashboard counts match with the Popular posts listings
    • Updated chartjs to the latest version

  • Bug fixes:

    • Fixed PHP notice on widgets.php page due to the block
    • Widget checkboxes are not saved in WordPress 5.8
    • post__in argument will now remove any false/0 values
    • Disabling/enabling author tracking didn’t always work
    • WP Multisite: Creating a new blog with automatically configure the plugin
    • Widget incorrectly included all post types when no post types were selected instead of using the global settings
    • Current post was incorrectly excluded when translation functions were run

3.0.0

Release post: https://webberzone.com/blog/top-10-v3-0-0/

  • Features:

    • New Top_Ten_Query class for fetching popular posts. Adds the function get_tptn_posts() which replaces get_tptn_pop_posts() which will be deprecated in a future version
    • New option to exclude the Front page and Posts page if these are set in Settings > Reading or via Customizer
    • New option in the Widget to include specific post IDs in the top lists. You can also use them in the shortcode using include_post_ids
    • New block for Gutenberg aka the block editor. The block is called Popular Posts [Top 10] and you can find it under the widgets category
    • Top 10 now supports the WP REST API. The plugin adds a new tracker type called REST API based which you can find under Counter/Tracker settings. Additionally, you can now receive the popular posts via a REST Request to top-10/v1/popular-posts

  • Enhancements/Modifications:

    • No popular posts feed will be added if the corresponding slug is set to blank
    • Changed sum_count to visits

  • Bug fixes:

    • PHP notices when displaying Network Wide Popular Posts in WordPress Multisite
    • Query based tracker gave an ajax error

For previous changelog entries, please refer to the separate changelog.txt file or Github Releases page

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Support

Issues resolved in last two months:

1 out of 3

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