I’m now using the Newspaper theme for my website, and I’ve built up several years worth of post views with the plugin “WordPress Popular Posts.” What is the best way to “import” those views into the Newspaper theme’s post views counter? And how do I make sure the “7 Days Post Sorting” widget only pulls posts from the past 7 days?
I’ve already gone in manually on a few old posts and updated our views for the Newspaper layout simply by typing the number in the custom field “post_views_count,” but I’m noticing that those posts are being put in the “popular posts over 7 days” widgets we have on front page and inner pages.
How do I make sure that widget is only pulling posts written over the past 7 days? I don’t want to see a post from 2012 in our sidebar.
I think the “popular posts” is “all time” and not just past 7 days; at least the last time I used it — it’s how popular ANY post has been over the last week, not posts created in the last week.
There is no simple way to import the old reads; in our case luckily we were using a counter for “hits/reads” which already was writing to a custom user meta field.
So, in our case we just went into the booster folder and edited the “reads” php file, to load from our existing “views” data field vs the newly created “post_views_count” field.
So, if you have an existing field like “views” or “read_views” or whatever, really simple to simply change which field that the site reads/writes to/from. Only downside is having to make that change with each theme upgrade.
To import from another plugin with a hidden dbase field, you’d likely need to use some kind of data migration tool or hire developer if the above field name change suggestion is not applicable.
Thanks for the fast response Chris! Your explanation on the “popular posts” over the past 7 days thing makes sense.
Also, I don’t think WP Popular Posts – https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-popular-posts/ — uses custom user fields to store their data. I think the data is stored in a MySQL DB so I’ll likely need to pay someone to “import” the old views.
Again, thanks!
