[Plugin: WordPress Popular Posts] Sorry. No data so far.

Don’t worry, no harm has been done ??

There are a couple of reasons why this is happening:

• Your wp-admin folder is password protected.
• You’re requiring users to log in into your blog in order to view your posts (there’s a workaround for that here)
• Your current theme does not have the wp_head() tag (or it’s not properly placed), necessary to update WordPress Popular Posts’ cache table
• Your site has not got any visits yet since my plugin was activated. You should give it some time.

Any of these sounds familiar to you?

P.S.: also, what’s your site URL?

Héctor, thank you for your reply. It finally populated itself today. As you said, “You should give it some time.”

Would you have any advice or suggestions on how to style the widget appearance?

Thanks again.

Another question: I have it checked to exclude categories, and I have the IDs typed in, but it still shows things from the excluded category. Do I need to do something else? It could be my theme. It is kind of weird in its category/post/page handling.

I notice now that I have it set to display popular posts by comments, but it’s not really doing this correctly. Because it is showing some of my folio work and I don’t even have comments enabled on those posts.

Hi Doug,

In my opinion, I think you should enable a fourth tab on your Comments/Recent/Archive box. The WordPress Popular Posts widget should fit in there perfectly!

About the categories issue, it could be your current theme and how it was coded. This issue seems to be affecting some specific themes since other users have also reported this problem, unfortunately I haven’t found out what is causing it since I haven’t got access to any of these themes to examinate them. Maybe it’d be a good idea to ask the theme author about this matter, maybe he/she could give some heads up on what might be going on. Try changing your theme for a moment and see if the category exclusion works as expected and double check that you’re providing the right ID.

About the popular posts sorted by comments not showing the expected results, here is a short explanation that hopefully should clear things up for you.

Hope all that helps!

I’d love to enable a fourth tab on the home page Comments section, but I haven’t a clue how to do that. I believe that is hard coded somewhere in my theme. My theme is pretty bad with the whole posts-pages-categories thing. It took me and another person (more knowledgeable about WP than me) about a month to actually get the nav menu working. Quite ridiculous.

I already inquired with the theme developer on several occasions about all these issues and his response was pretty lame. So there’s no help there. I read your explanation, but it didn’t really apply to my situation.

The plugin is pulling my folio posts in, when I don’t even have comments enabled on those posts, which is odd.

My plugin doesn’t exclude posts without comments (even thought it probably should, might change that), that’s why your folio posts keep popping up – they’re still cached as popular because people are checking them constantly (and that’s one of the reasons why the category exclusion feature was introduced).

Anyways, if it really bothers you so badly, you can apply a small hack to my plugin to exclude popular posts that have no comments from the listing (this modification affects all sorting options, including comments count sorting):

1. Download to your desktop the wordpress-popular-posts.php file located at your wp-contents/plugins/wordpress-popular-posts and open it using a text editor such as Notepad.
2. Find this line:
   

   $mostpopular = $wpdb->get_results(“SELECT $wpdb->posts.ID, $wpdb->posts.post_title $fields FROM $wpdb->posts $join WHERE $wpdb->posts.post_status = ‘publish’ AND $wpdb->posts.post_password = ” AND $range $force_pv $nopages $exclude GROUP BY $wpdb->posts.ID ORDER BY $sortby DESC LIMIT ” . $instance[‘limit’] . “”);

   … and replace it with:

   $mostpopular = $wpdb->get_results(“SELECT $wpdb->posts.ID, $wpdb->posts.post_title $fields FROM $wpdb->posts $join WHERE $wpdb->posts.post_status = ‘publish’ AND $wpdb->posts.post_password = ” AND $range $force_pv $nopages $exclude AND comment_count > 0 GROUP BY $wpdb->posts.ID ORDER BY $sortby DESC LIMIT ” . $instance[‘limit’] . “”);

3. Save changes, and reupload the file to your site via FTP.

I haven’t tested this, so please let me know if you encounter any issues.

Hi Ikki!
I hope you can help me too!
No matter what I try, I always get “Sorry. No data so far.”.
– My wp-admin folder is not password protected
– My visitors are not requiring to log in
– My theme does have the wp_head-tag in the head-section

The tables wp_popularpostsdata and wp_popularpostsdatacache always remain empty (checked with phpMyAdmin).
Do you have an idea? My URL: https://www.newsfabrik.com

Best regards, Holger

Hi there,

Just checked your site and my plugin does print the necessary scripts to catch your popular posts, but for some reason it won’t store the info on your database.

I suspect that your theme has something to do with that, but to be sure I’d like to ask you to change it for a second and see if my plugin starts caching as expected.

Alreddy thank you for your help!
I changed the theme, visited some posts in a different browser and checked the result in the database: the tables remain empty anyway. ??
How can that be? Other ideas?

Mmm that’s weird. You’re running which version of WordPress?

I’m runing WordPress 2.9.2
I have already disabled the plugin and then re-enabled. What else can I do?

To be honest, I’m out of ideas. WPP seems to be printing the Ajax script that is supposed to update your databases, but for some reason your blog won’t do it.

Are you using any other plugins that can create tables on your database?

I have found out something! If I disable the plugin “Theme My Login”, everything works fine. ??
Unfortunately I need this plugin… ??
Is there a possibility for both to work together?

Well, I’d need to examinate this plugin you mentioned and see why it breaks mine.

In the meanwhile, the only thing I can suggest is to try and run WordPress Popular Posts 1.5.1. It’ll probably work better with your current setup and you won’t have to disable the “Theme my login” plugin. However, there are certain features you won’t be able to use like multiple WPP widgets, WPP Stats Dashboard, etc.