This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Recent Post Views

Description

This plugin requires the WP-PostViews plugin to be installed and setup to work correctly. (https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-postviews/)

This plugin displays a widget in the sidebar with the most recently viewed posts over the last 2 days, the number of times they were viewed, a link to each, and images corresponding to whether they were “hot” posts or not (calculated as a percentage of the most viewed post).

Screenshots

  • As you see from the screenshot, you get a nice sidebar widget with posts titles, links to the post, and a count of the recent number of views.

Installation

  1. Upload recent-post-views.php to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
  3. Put the post in the sidebar via the ‘Widgets’ menu, save a title for the widget.
  4. Use the shortcode [recentpostviews] in your pages and posts. See FAQ’s for more info. Accepts “cat”, “posts”, and “days” as inputs.

FAQ

How do I use the shortcode?

The basic format is [recentpostviews], which will by default show a list of the top 7 posts, from all categories, over the last 2 days.
Options are “cat”, “posts” and “days”.
* “cat” is the category ID.
* “posts” is the number of posts you want to display.
* “days” is the number of days back you want the shortcode to query, as in “over the last (n) days.”

Example: [recentpostviews cat=”5″ posts=”10″ days=”3″]
*This would display the 10 most recent posts from category 5 over the last 3 days.

If you’re not getting any results for the shortcode, try changing the number of days.

By default, the “hotlevel” for posts is 75% or .75 in the shortcode. E.g., a post will not show up as “hot” unless it is greater than or equal to the post with the most number of views over the same time frame.

How can I change options, like what is considered a “recent” post?

Just add the widget and select your options.

I have multiple widgets, and some of them have posts that are viewed the same number of times, but one is not a “hot” post. What gives?

Whether a post is hot or not is dependent on the max number of views for any post over the timeframe you have selected. E.g., if you have a widget based on the last 3 days and one based on the last 7, the level for a “hot” post will be different. I’m planning on changing this in a future update, such that the max number of posts for a particular category will be calculated.

The number of views for my posts are not updating, why?

I actually had this issue myself, and discovered that it’s because the postmeta table was not updating the number of views. As a temporary solution, I installed the WP-PostViews plugin (at https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-postviews/) and enabled the option in the settings menu that said to register views from everyone, not just guests. Thanks to GamerZ for a great plugin, and for helping to fix this issue. If you’re having this problem, I suggest that recent-post-views should be used in conjunction with WP-PostViews.

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Contributors & Developers

“Recent Post Views” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

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Interested in development?

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

Changelog

1.5

  • Added settings sub-menu with styling options.
  • Fixed list and table code for widgets and shortcode.

1.4

  • Added shortcode functionality.
  • Minor changes to the table tags in the widget.

1.3

  • Prefixed all the variable names and made the paths to image files relative.
  • This should be a more stable release, one that can co-exist peacefully with other plugins.

1.2

  • Minor bug fix

1.1

  • Added option to set threshold percent level for “hot” posts.
  • Added option to change html color code for number of views.

1.0

  • Adds option to change number of posts and to select specific categories.

0.5

  • Adds option to widget to change number of days for recent posts.

0.1

  • First release, displays most recent posts views over last 2 days.