Thanks to Internet Business Daily for pointing me to a couple of new WordPress Plugins – WP-PostRating and WP-PostViews. Both Plugins are the work of Lester Chan, a web programmer from Singapore. He has a bunch of WordPress Plugins on his programming page but so far, these the two I have chosen to run.
WP-PostRatings
WP-PostRating adds an AJAX rating system so readers can rate your blog post. Ratings are based on a 1 – 5 star system. A cookie is used to ensure one vote per reader. The stats display how many total votes and the average rating the post received. It’s a cool Plugin for getting reader feedback and will help gauge the usefulness of your posts.
Installation is very easy and the documentation is fantastic. Just upload to your Plugins folder, activate in your Plugins control panel, and then add a line of code to call up the script. I placed it at the bottom of the post.
WP-PostViews
The WP-Postviews Plugin enables you to display how many times a post had been viewed. It can also display the top 10 most viewed posts or pages. The counter begins the instant you turn the Plugin on and install the call codes.
The view count does not include the posts on the front page. The count will only increase when readers click on the post to view the post individually – this would happen if they want to make/view a comment or if they were coming from a RSS feed or Google search. It’s interesting to note that not many readers click beyond the top post. It’s also interesting that the current 2nd most read post is, Who Is John Chow?
Like WP-PostRatings Plugin, WP-PostView is very easy to install – upload Plugin, activate, then place the PHP call to where you want the PostView to appear. Another piece of code is supplied to list the top 10 most viewed posts. I placed that in my sidebar.
Lester Chan has 15 WordPress Plugins in his programming page. I haven’t tried them all but there are some really interesting ones that I may test. If you’re using any of the other Plugins and like it a lot, please let me know. You can do so in the comments.
*Update – I’ve turned off the Comment Karma and the Challenge Question Plugins.
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One of the most common complaint (or excuse) I hear from potential new bloggers is they don’t know how to install WordPress. Terms like FTP and CPanel are like a foreign language and setting up a database might as well be setting up the space shuttle for a launch. Because of the technology barrier, many would-be bloggers never start their blogs...