Popularity Contest Widget
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Update 2nd December 2008: The Popularity Contest Widget has now moved to the wordpress.org site. All updates will now appear on the new site.
Popularity Contest is a great Wordpress plugin for displaying your most popular blog posts. It powers the Teapot Highlights over on the right hand side of this post.
One thing missing from Popularity Contest is a widget. We created one for this blog, so we thought we may as well share it for everybody else to use too.
Place the Popularity Contest Widget in your plugin directory (remember to strip the .txt off the end) then go to Presentation > Widgets. You can then drag ‘n drop the widget into your sidebar.
You can edit the title and the number of posts to display. Don’t forget to press the Save Changes button.
Popularity: 39% [?]




Jack Hughes's wry observations of the tech industry from the bottom looking up.
[...] style is for a particular subject. The recent addition of the Popularity Contest plugin and widget help identify posts that go over well with readers, which is essential in determining the style I [...]
Quote | Posted November 4, 2007, 5:02 AMBefore, I used to add this Popularity Contest widget manually to my template functions.php, thanks for yours plugin, now I don’t have to
Quote | Posted November 7, 2007, 12:31 AM@poer – great. I’m pleased you’re getting some value out of it. No need for us all to go around implementing exactly the same stuff all of the time.
Quote | Posted November 7, 2007, 10:31 AMGreat job Jack. I’m considering turning a couple of my plugins into widgets. Hopefully its not too difficult!
Quote | Posted November 20, 2007, 8:43 AM@ses5909 – I can’t take credit I’m afraid. Dean wrote it who co-owns OPENXTRA. Widgets aren’t difficult so I doubt you’ll have too many problems with it.
Quote | Posted November 20, 2007, 12:10 PM[...] to OpenXtra yg beberapa waktu lalu merilis Plugin Popularity Contest Widget, proses penambahan secara manual ini, sekarang tidak diperlukan [...]
Quote | Posted November 26, 2007, 9:16 AMExcellent! Thank you for this!
Quote | Posted January 11, 2008, 3:32 AMThanks much, very helpful little widget.
Quote | Posted May 13, 2008, 9:18 PM[...] my search for a fix I also found a great widget for Popularity Contest. Just upload and activate it and you have a nice popular posts widget to stick in your sidebar. [...]
Quote | Posted May 15, 2008, 4:47 PMGreetings!
Thanks for the script. However, I encountered some problem upon re-activating the plugin. Initially when I added the widget the popularity contest folder, I was told to upgrade to a newer version. After which the widget disappeared and I was told that my original plugin triggered a fatal error. Kindly assist. Thanks.
Quote | Posted November 27, 2008, 12:41 PM@PzheL – am I reading you correctly, did you add the widget to the folder in which the popularity contest plugin is located? If so, when you upgraded the plugin the widget may have been deleted? I wouldn’t recommend adding it to the same directory. Keep it separate.
Quote | Posted November 27, 2008, 12:57 PMOh, yea, I added them to the same directory. No wonder! haha, thanks for the help. great widget! =D
Quote | Posted November 28, 2008, 7:11 AMHowdy dudes!
At my blog, the widget dont work correctly. The articlenames are over others… can u give me hints, how to solve that?
When you visit my site, you see the widget at the bottom (the last widget called “beliebte Artikel”).
Thank you in advance!
Chris, Scatterd
Quote | Posted December 6, 2008, 9:11 PM@Scatterd – by the looks of it, the widget is using some CSS styles that probably aren’t defined in your template. Will look more closely on Monday when I am back at work and I can talk with the person who wrote the code.
Quote | Posted December 6, 2008, 10:10 PMThat would be very nice. Thank you
Quote | Posted December 6, 2008, 10:22 PM@Scatterd – I’ve had a look and can see the problem, basically whats happening is that the title for your articles are overflowing the space provided for them.
This can be fixed by a slight change of the style ‘.rsidebar ul li ul li’ (line 84 of your style.css).
You can either change the height attribute to ‘auto’, which will then display the full title without the overflow happening (e.g. height: auto;) or add
overflow: hidden;
which will stop the overflow but will also not display the whole article title.
The choice is yours!
Quote | Posted December 9, 2008, 11:58 AMThank you so much. All works fine now
Quote | Posted December 9, 2008, 5:41 PM