Themes 'n' Templates Base

What choices do you have for listing most viewed posts?

The first one that comes to my mind is WP-Postviews plugin by Lester Chan. I am using it on many of my Wordpress powered websites, including TNT Base.

You can find it here: http://lesterchan.net/wordpress/readme/wp-postviews.html

Everything works great with Lester’s plugin, it does what is supposed to, but I needed a little bit more. I wanted to show thumbnails of the most viewed posts. All those of you runing photoblogs should know what I am talking about.

So, after hours of searching and even a short talk to Lester, I have come up with my way of doing it.

Here is my solution:

Basically what we need to do is

1. To create a function that lists the thumbnail of a post
2. To integrate this function into Lesters great plugin

I have found this function here: http://www.wprecipes.com/how-to-get-the-first-image-from-the-post-and-display-it

The function to list thumbnails of the first image in a post goes like this:

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function catch_that_image() {
  global $post, $posts;
  $first_img = '';
  ob_start();
  ob_end_clean();
  $output = preg_match_all('/<img.+src=[\'"]([^\'"]+)[\'"].*>/i', $post->post_content, $matches);
  $first_img = $matches [1] [0];
  if(empty($first_img)){ //Defines a default image
    $first_img = "/images/default.jpg";
  }
  return $first_img;
}

This must be in the functions.php file inside your theme.
Now, you can list on the home page or anywhere else in your theme the thumbnail of the image in a post by inserting

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<img src="<?php echo catch_that_image() ;?>" style="width:100px; height:auto;" alt="" />

In order to have this integrated with WP-Postviews plugin you must edit wp-postviews.php which is in the /wp-content/plugins/wp-postviews/ folder of your blog.
In my example we will list the thumbnails for the most viewed posts by category, but you can do it for any of the functions in the same way.
So, in the wp-postviews.php find this line
### Function: Display Most Viewed Page/Post By Category ID
Under this line there must be many $temp rows. Add the following row:

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$temp = str_replace("%THUMBNAIL%", catch_that_image(), $temp);

At this point you have finished coding.
Now, go back to your Dashboard settings for WP-Postviews and in the Template for Most Viewed Posts by Category use the newly created “%THUMBNAIL%”.
REMEMBER: thumbnail is a link so use it like

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<img src="%THUMBNAIL" alt="" />

Hope it helps and I am right here to answer future questions on this topic. Until then, please leave a comment if you can improve my method or if you know a better one and don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS if you find this topic interesting.