[IMPLEMENTED] New sort: Most popular among posts of last 7 days

Hello there, i wanted to show on a block the most popular posts among the posts of last 7 days.

Let me be more clear: Not posts-of-any-time that gain the most popularity the last 7 days.
I wanted posts-of-last-7-days that gain the most popularity.

So i implemented the “Popular among posts of last 7 days” sorting method. It took me 5 years in isolation, a team of nuclear physicists and billions of dollars to do it. And i give it now for free. How kind!

IMPORTANT REQUIREMENTS: ***YOU*** NEED TO KNOW PHP PROGRAMMING TO DO THIS. LINE NUMBERS OF CODE PROVIDED BELOW ARE NOT EXACT, THEY ARE JUST TO GIVE YOU A HINT WHERE TO LOOK AT, BECAUSE I DON’T KNOW WHAT VERSION ARE THESE FILES SO LINE NUMBERS MAY BE DIFFERENT AMONG DIFFERENT VERSIONS. SO DONT BLINDLY COPY PASTE THIS STUFF ON THAT LINES.

ONE MORE TIME WARNING: be carefull, you are messing with php code here, if anything goes wrong, i have nothing to do with it, this comes with no warranty at all do it at your own risk and its NOT OFFICIALLY SUPPORTED I DONT WORK FOR TAGDIV.

So:

ADD this case in the switch of Newspaper/includes/wp_booster/td_data_source.php its somewhere near (not exactly) 140-something line

Add:

            case 'popular_of_latest':
                $wp_query_args['meta_key'] = td_page_views::$post_view_counter_key;
                $wp_query_args['orderby'] = 'meta_value_num';
                $wp_query_args['order'] = 'DESC';
                $wp_query_args['date_query'] = array(
                            'column' => 'post_date_gmt',
                            'after' => '1 week ago'
                            );
                break;

ok now we need to add an array element in Newspaper/includes/td_config.php

find this block of code near line 4020-something and change this

array(
				"param_name" => "sort",
				"type" => "dropdown",
				"value" => array (
					'- Latest -' => '',
					'Random posts Today' => 'random_today' ,
					'Random posts from last 7 Day' => 'random_7_day' ,
					'Alphabetical A -> Z' => 'alphabetical_order',
					'Popular (all time)' => 'popular',
					'Popular (jetpack + stats module requiered) Does not work with other settings/pagination' => 'jetpack_popular_2',
					'Popular (last 7 days) - theme counter (enable from panel)' => 'popular7',
					'Featured' => 'featured',
					'Highest rated (reviews)' => 'review_high',
					'Random Posts' => 'random_posts',
					'Most Commented' => 'comment_count'
				),

to this

array(
				"param_name" => "sort",
				"type" => "dropdown",
				"value" => array (
					'- Latest -' => '',
					'Random posts Today' => 'random_today' ,
					'Random posts from last 7 Day' => 'random_7_day' ,
					'Alphabetical A -> Z' => 'alphabetical_order',
					'Popular (all time)' => 'popular',
					'Popular (jetpack + stats module requiered) Does not work with other settings/pagination' => 'jetpack_popular_2',
					'Popular (last 7 days) - theme counter (enable from panel)' => 'popular7',
					'Featured' => 'featured',
					'Highest rated (reviews)' => 'review_high',
					'Random Posts' => 'random_posts',
					'Most Commented' => 'comment_count',
                    'Popular among posts of last 7 days' => 'popular_of_latest'
				),

as you can see the only “change” was the addition of that last element, and adding a comma at the end of the previous element.

now this sorting option should be available on your blocks here and there

The kind good people at tagdiv may wanna add this at a future release as i find this useful and its just a quick commit.

p.s. the db query produced is fine performance-wise.

• This topic was modified 10 years by dimitris.

Thank you dimitris! I needed this for Most Popular Posts of Last Year, so I changed ‘after’ => ‘1 week ago’ to ‘after’ => ‘1 year ago’.

Hi

Thank you for the code. It worked perfectly. I’m using WP Super Cache plugin, and when I turn Caching ON this new sorting stops working.
I tried enabling/disabling “7 days post sorting” in the Newspaper theme panel, but with no success. Seems like the Caching plugin prevents this code to work.
Is there any workaround I can use?
thank you

Thank you for the reply. I forgot to mention that I already tried enabling and disabling the ajax post views, but again with no success.

Thank you Bogdan. Apparently it is working now.

Successfully implemented thank you.

Just noticed one thing- The number of popular posts that for last 7 days was selected to 6, but it’s currently showing only 4 posts on my home page. ( Have a look here: https://snag.gy/MNjc8i.jpg )Why is it so? Doesn every post published in last 7 days need to get views more than some fix post views number? I have published more than 10 posts in the last 7 days.

What can be causing this issue. Please help. Thank you.

Hey,
Just one thing, will it start counting views from the time, I activated this option ? Because other settings like Ajax post views count under post setting is and “Use 7 days post sorting” under block setting is already ON for last 10 days.

Also, if it counts the view since it is enabled on the homepage, then how does it show even those 4 posts?

Does “activating this option” mean creating this option or activating it on the homepage?

Anyways, I will wait for it to work well.

Thank you very much for your insightful comment.

Oh! Okay! Understood!

Thank you. 🙂

Is this tutorial work well on newsmag?
Is it need enabled theme counter?

Hey Syams,
Rest assured as the concerned files are identical and hence you won’t face much difference. I have checked it on Newspaper theme and it works really well.

Just take the backup of these two files before making any changes.

Hey, thanks for this and I have a somewhat easier way of implementing an alternate sort, in my case sort posts by last MODIFIED date, not last PUBLISHED date. With my method you have to “sacrifice” one of the existing sorts and in my case I decided to replace the “Oldest posts” since I know I would not ever use that one.

It’s only two files you need to change, make sure you back them up and also understand that when you do a theme update these will be overwritten so you will want to keep copies. These apply to v. 8 of the theme.

First make the below changes to includes/td_config.php, starting at line 7351:

array(
“param_name” => “sort”,
“type” => “dropdown”,
“value” => array (
‘- Latest -‘ => ”,
// Sacrificing the ‘oldest posts’ sort, we’ll never use it
‘Modified date’ => ‘oldest_posts’,

Then make this change to includes/wp-booster/td_data_source.php, starting at line 116:

$wp_query_args[‘cat’] = get_cat_ID(TD_FEATURED_CAT); //add the featured cat
break;
case ‘oldest_posts’:
// Replaced by me w/sort by modified date, newest first
$wp_query_args[‘orderby’] = ‘modified’;
$wp_query_args[‘order’] = ‘DESC’;
break;
case ‘popular’:

That’s it. Now when you are doing a grid sort you will see Modified date instead of Oldest posts. This is sorting most recently modified first (‘DESC’) but if for some reason you wanted the oldest by modified date you could change it to ‘ASC’.

Also, in case anyone is not aware of this, there is a free plugin called “Last Modified Timestamp” that will add a Last Modified Date column to your Posts and Pages admin screens. For what we do as a newspaper, in most cases the last time o post was modified is much more important than the published date of a post as far as which posts to display in the grid(s).

Hope this helps somebody and thanks to everyone who posts solutions like these as many of them have helped me in the past.