How to make several lists of popular posts?

Hi @giorgos93,

Yes, you can have several Popular Posts widgets on your sidebars, each with their own settings and all.

To learn how to display popular posts by category please check this FAQ: What is “Taxonomy” for?

Hi, Hector!

Sorry for late reply, but I’ve just decided to implement this function, that I wrote about in this topic.

So I read your FAQ “What is Taxonomy for”, but I guess that’s not what I want. From what I understand, this option allows to show popular posts from certain categories, and to exclude certain categories IN GENERAL. But I use “Popular Posts” widget in my sidebar for ALL posts, so I can’t exclude certain categories there.

Can I somehow show popular posts from different categories on posts from the EXACT SAME categories? For example, on “Quizzes” category show only popular quizzes. On “Websites for writers” category show only posts with popular websites for writers, etc?

Or I didn’t understand well, what you meant?

Thanks in advance!

Hi @giorgos93,

Yeah, I could have been a bit more specific. I was probably tired or something when I wrote my previous reply haha.

The short answer is no, the widget can’t automatically detect the current category.

What I tried to say with my previous comment was “what you can do is set up a WPP widget for each category and then somehow show one or the other depending on the current category” but that might not be practical if your site has a lot of categories.

Alternatively you could also use the wpp_get_mostpopular() template tag, obtain the current category ID via PHP, then pass it to the function so it renders popular posts under said category.

Thanks for the answer!

I guess, that this alternative method is too hard for me to implement ??

But I hope, that you will consider adding an option “to show popular posts only from the same category” in future plugin releases!

And since I wrote to you, can I ask something else?

I have a rule in my robots.txt, that disallows for search robots to enter every folder that has “wp-” in it’s name.

So I’ve just checked in Google Search Console one of my posts, and saw, that robots.txt blocks an access to 2 of your plugin’s files:

1 — /wp-json/wordpress-popular-posts/v1/popular-posts

2 — /wp-json/wordpress-popular-posts/v1/popular-posts/widget/3?is_single=346

Do I need to add these files in exceptions, or they better to be blocked?

Thanks in advance for an answer!

The first one is what WPP uses to track views, and the second one is what renders the widget on your sidebar when the “Ajaxify widget” option is enabled.

I guess that it’s OK to prevent bots from accessing the first one, after all you may not want their visits being tracked by WPP.

The second one though I’m not so sure since it returns content. Googlebot, Google’s search engine, might crawl it to find your popular posts. I suppose it should be fine as Google can still find these posts in other areas of your website.