WordPress Complete by Hayder Hasin

Author:Hayder, Hasin [Hasin Hayder]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Packt Publishing

Step 11: Top Ranked Book List

This is a slightly tough part of this chapter. To display some books as top-listed books we have several options. We may create a manual list by editing the sidebar; however, it will not be dynamic at all and is not an acceptable solution. A better solution is to create a real top books list by counting the number of views of each book and dynamically displaying them. For this purpose, we need to create a plug-in on our own. Don't worry, we will keep it simple.

To make this plug-in work properly, we have to store the number of hits in persistent storage, that is where we can re-use them. You can use the database for storing them and that will be the best solution. However, as we are going for a simple plug-in, we will be using a simple text file for this purpose; but remember to use the database (either MySQL or SQLite) wherever possible. If you are already familiar with PHP coding, you can modify the code to suit any database table instead of a flat file.

Now we will design a plug-in, which adds a one pixel by one pixel image to the content of every post dynamically. The image will refer to a PHP file that will act as a hit counter after each call. The following code explains this:

<? /* Plugin Name: Hit Counter Plugin URI: Uh.. No URL Description: A plugin which counts the number of times a post been viewed Author: Hasin Hayder Version: 1.0 Author URI: http://hasin.wordpress.com */ ?> <? add_filter("the_content","HitCount"); function HitCount($content) { global $id; $categories = get_the_category(); foreach($categories as $category) { if ($category->cat_name=="All Books") return $content."<img style='display:none ' src='http://wordpress_url/hitcount.php?id={$id}'>; } return $content; ?>

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