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This is what the latest release (2.1.6) of my Yet Another Related Posts Plugin looked like under Mint, using my WordPress plugin downloads pepper, which in turn gets its data from wordpress.org:

It’s always interesting to see these release spikes in download traffic. Note that this release was on the Wednesday but that was during the day, so Wednesday’s traffic is still higher than the normal ~300/day level, while the big peak (by day) is on Thursday. Too bad wordpress.org doesn’t give me hourly stats, though I guess that would be a little ridiculous.

YARPP is just about at that 35k download mark. I’m looking forward to the next release. ^^

The advanced WordPress user is intimately familiar with query_posts, the function which controls which posts are displayed in “The Loop.” query_posts gives plugin and theme writers the ability to display only posts written in Janary (query_posts("monthnum=1")) or disallow posts from a certain category (query_posts("cat=-529")¹). One of the parameters you can set here is orderby which affects the ordering of the posts returned, with allowed values such as author, date, or title. But what if you want to order your posts in some other order, defined outside of your wp_posts table? Here I’m going to lay out some thoughts on rolling your own external ordering source for WordPress queries.

In order to introduce an external ordering source, we need to do four things: 1. create the external ordering source, 2. hook up (read “join”) the external ordering source 3. make sure we use that order, and 4. make it play nice. ^^

By the way, I’m going to assume you, dear reader, are PHP-savvy, proficient in MySQL, and already know a little about WordPress. This how-to is not for the PHPhobic.

(続きを読む…)

As more and more people have been using my Yet Another Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, I thought it would be nice to have an RSS feed for users to stay on top of the latest releases.

Clicking on a version’s permalink will let you download the plugin. Subscribe now and be the first to find out when the upcoming version 2.1 is released!

I decided to semi-automate this RSS-producing process as well. As a plugin developer using wordpress.org’s plugin hosting, I sync a local copy of the plugin to their server using SVN. I wrote a PHP script to get the modification date information directly from the local files, parse the version log in the read me, and produce the RSS feed. If there’s an interest, perhaps I’ll release this code in the future.

UPDATE:

This posting is now outdated… for the latest information on YARPP, please visit YARPP’s very own page on my site, or its page on wordpress.org. If you have questions, please submit on the wordpress.org forum. Thanks!

Description

Today I’m releasing Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP¹) 1.0 for WordPress. It’s the result of some tinkering with Peter Bowyer’s version of Alexander Malov & Mike Lu’s Related Entries plugin. Modifications made include:

1. Limiting by a threshold: Peter Bowyer did the great work of making the algorithm use mysql’s fulltext search score to identify related posts. But it currently just displayed, for example, the top 5 most “relevant” entries, even if some of them weren’t at all similar. Now you can set a threshold limit² for relevance, and you get more related posts if there are more related posts and less if there are less. Ha!
2. Being a better plugin citizen: now it doesn’t require the user to click some sketchy button to alter the database and enable a fulltext key. Using register_activation_hook, it does it automagically on plugin activation. Just install and go!
3. Miscellany: a nicer options screen, displaying the fulltext match score on output for admins, an option to allow related posts from the future, a couple bug fixes, etc.

Installation

Just put it in your /wp-content/plugins/ directory, activate, and then drop the related_posts function in your WP loop. Change any options in the Related Posts (YARPP) Options pane in Admin > Plugins.

You can override any options in an individual instance of related_posts using the following syntax:

`related_posts(limit, threshold, before title, after title, show excerpt, len, before excerpt, after excerpt, show pass posts, past only, show score);

Most of these should be self-explanatory. They’re also in the same order as the options on the YARPP Options pane.

Example: related_posts(10, null, 'title: ') changes the maximum related posts number to 10, keeps the default threshold from the Options pane, and adds title: to the beginning of every title.

There’s also a related_posts_exist) function. It has three optional arguments to override the defaults: a threshold, the past only boolean, and the show password-protected posts boolean.

Examples

For a barebones setup, just drop <?php related_posts(); ?> right after <?php the_content() ?>.

On my own blog I use the following code with <li> and </li> as the before/after entry options:

Related posts:







No related posts.

Coming soon (probably)

1. Incorporation of tags and categories in the algorithm. I’ve gotten the code working, but I still need to think about what the most natural algorithm would be for weighing these factors against the mysql fulltext score currently used (and works pretty well, I must say).
2. Um, something else! Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvement. ^^

Version log

1.0 Initial upload (20071229)

1.0.1 Bugfix: 1.0 assumed you had Markdown installed (20070105)