Most Shared Posts – WordPress Plugin

Most Share Posts

Screenshots of the Most Shared Posts plugin on various sites.

The Most Shared Posts plugin for WordPress allows you to display, as a widget, which of your blog posts have the most social shares and are proving to be your most popular content.

download button
Version 1.1.0 – 14th August 2011
hosted on wordpress.org

 

If you’d like to see this plugin in action, you can see it on this site, or you could check out Kate Morris’ SEO Blog or John Doherty’s SEO Blog. They both helped to test the initial version.

Features

If you have feature requests, bug reports or you just want to show me where you are using the plugin please post a comment below or drop me an email to [email protected].

  • Fetches Facebook Likes, Twitter Tweets and the new Google +1s.
  • Caches results to ensure good performance. Older posts are cached for longer.
  • Select which of the 3 social counts to include.
  • Select how many posts to display in the list, and an age cut-off.
  • For beginners, it is very easy to install with no necessary customisation.
  • For advanced users, there are various display options available.
  • Option to hide the counts and icons.
  • You can have multiple instances on the same page with different titles (e.g “Most Tweeted Posts” showing just the Tweet counts, or “Most Liked Posts” showing just the FB Likes counts etc.)

Installation

The steps to install ‘Most Shared Posts’ are quite simple:

  1. Upload `most-shared-posts` directory to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory.
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
  3. Go to the ‘Widgets’ page in the ‘Appearance’ section of WordPress.
  4. Now you can add the widget to different pages of your site. Recommended pages to add the widget: “Sidebar Index”, “Sidebar Single”, “Sidebar Category”.
  5. You can customise the plugin differently for each of these sections should you wish.
  6. NOTE: The plugin throttles how quickly it gathers the social data, to ensure it does not cause any slowness for your users. For small sites with less than 100 posts, this should typically be done in the first hour. For sites with other 2000 posts it could take a day or more.
  7. Now load a page on your blog which should show the widget. This will initiate the first data fetch.

Frequently Asked Questions

  1. Q: I just installed and refreshed the page, but my most shared posts are not at the top of the list?
    A: The plugin will take a little time to collect all the data about your posts. It does so in batches so as not to upset the social networks by requesting too much data at once. You should find that it’ll sort itself out and catch up quite quickly.
  2. Q: I just got tweeted but the count hasn’t updated! Why not?
    A: The results for each post are cached for varying lengths of time depending on the posts age. Very recent posts (less than 2 days old) are cached for an hour, and then older posts are cached for incrementally longer periods of time. Posts in the last month are cached for 12 hours, posts 1-6 months old are cached for 48 hours and older posts are cached for a week.
  3. Q: My older posts aren’t showing up…
    A: When you add an instance of the widget to a sidebar in the WordPress admin section, you can customise how far back you wish to look; the default is 2 years.
  4. Q: Where can I change how many posts are included in the list?
    A: When you add an instance of the widget to a sidebar in the WordPress admin section, you can customise how many posts to include; the default is 5.
  5. Q: I activated the plugin, but I don’t see it. 🙁
    A: This plugin is a widget, so after activating it you need to go to the Appearance->Widgets section of your WordPress settings and select which pages you’d like it to appear on.
  6. Q: Can I include the count inside a post or a page?
    A: Yes – there is now a shortcode option. The shortcode has a few options (all are optional):

    [most-shared-posts num_posts="5" max_month_age="24" title="Most Shared Posts"]
  7. Q: I have no shares. How depressing… help!
    A: Assuming you’re providing content worthy of being shared… Make sure you are including sharing buttons on your blog in a consistent fashion. I recommend adding them into your theme, or alternatively:

    • Alex Moss of Pleer has created some great social button plugins for Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
    • The AddThis plugin is very popular, and provides a variety of sharing buttons.
    • At sharethis.com, they provide a variety of sharing plugins.
    • The Sharedaddy plugin, part of Jetpack from WordPress.com, provides a range of social buttons.

Changelog

Version 1.0.0 – 4th August 2011

  • Initial Release

Version 1.0.1 – 5th August 2011

  • Update on the format of the API requests for added robustness.
  • Added link to the FAQ on plugin activation.

Version 1.1.0 – 14th August 2011

  • Can now view social stats in admin area (with or without an active widget).
  • Added a shortcode option to include within posts/pages.
  • Data now collected without an active widget.
  • Improved method for scheduling data collection.
  • Various code tidying and improvements.

Donate

Please consider a donation, or alternatively enabling the attribution link in the settings:

Donate Button

Write a Comment

Comment

160 Comments

  1. is there a way to customize the plugin to set a time period for tracking the likes or tweets? For example, if I wanted to run a contest to see which post got the most likes during a month or so?

    By the way, I really like what the plugin does already. It’s working great on my site.

    Thanks.

  2. Please consider, that in some cases you have to copy a php.ini file in the directory WordPress is installed. The php.ini has to contain the lin “allow_url_fopen=on”. Otherwise the plugin won’t work.

  3. I install your plugin, but I have a problem with styles, how to edit .css for this plugin? I use only this code for my post page:

    [most-shared-posts num_posts=”10″ max_month_age=”24″ title=”Most Shared Posts”]

    I don’t have widget. How to change .CSS?

    • I’m having the same problem on one site but not on another. I’m guessing it’s a plugin conflict. I am using the same caching plugin on both sites though so I guess it’s not that. Quickcache plugin.

  4. Just getting started with this plugin. I like how clean it looks and it seems to be working great for me. Thank you for providing this plugin. I’d love to see a Pinterest feature that keeps track of repins.

  5. Hi, You have done an admirable job. I will definitely stumbleupon it and I’ll recommend to my friends. I know they are going to be taken advantage of this great site.

  6. I am also wondering if you could provide some type of styling guide as mine is a mess on both my sites. It looks so tidy in your widget.

  7. Hi,

    There has not been any update for this great pluging for over a year, perhaps it’s time :-)?

    I’m using WP 3.4.1 with around 1100 posts and have the following issues:

    1: I don’t understand why posts with no shares are displayed (either in Admin or Widget). In widget it will thus display different posts with no shares each time widget is refreshed – the same goes for the Admin gui.

    Top 100 should never display other posts than those that have shares – that is the point of the plugin. Nor should the widget display any other posts except those with shares, so if limit is set to 5 in widget and there are only 2 so far – only those 2 posts should be visible.

    2: I have now had mine active for a couple of weeks, and only one of my shared posts is discovered. Each time I refresh the Admin gui, different posts are displayed below the single post with discovered shares.

    Regards
    Morten Ross
    http://www.ross.no/communicate

  8. Would love to see a version for Drupal … you can contact me if you need some coding on Drupal (though I don’t have too much time for it)

  9. Hi,

    Do you still work on the ‘most shared posts’ plugin? I am looking for a plugin like the one you made, but the intention is to sort photos (most shared photos). I don’t think your plugin currently allows to see the picture in a post, does it? Do you know a way on how to integrate this? Or do you know a plugin that is right for my needs?

    Thanks
    Christophe

  10. This blog is very interesting. But if you want to extract the herbal aroma and flavor molecules from the similar ingredients you may use volcano vaporizer . This device has a digital and analog temperature control and two valves options by which it fills the balloon.

  11. plugin on:
    Total query time: 0,35153s for 588 queries.
    Total num_query time: 4,765 for 600 num_queries.

    plugin off:
    Total query time: 0,13558s for 100 queries.
    Total num_query time: 4,117 for 102 num_queries.

    so 600(!) queries with plugin and 100 without the plugin? pleeeaaasse fix! that costs 2 seconds before page renders.

  12. I’m still learning from you, but I’m trying to achieve my goals. I certainly enjoy reading all that is posted on your blog.Keep the information coming.

  13. Hi there, I just read your blog post regularly and I own a very similar one and I was just curious about if you have loads of spammy responses?
    If you are just how do you prevent it, any plugin or anything you can recommend?
    I get so much lately it’s driving me insane so any help is really appreciated.

  14. Hey folks- Anyone know if I can access the most-shared data from within my theme without displaying the widget, etc? My client’s wireframes call for displaying the one most-shared post within a tabset on the homepage. I was going to take the most-shared post and then query for that post and display it as desired.

    I guess if I could customize this plugin a whole bunch to display this one post how creative wants it, that would do it as well.

    Thanks!
    -Rob

  15. Hi, i have problem with showing data for facebook and twitter. Plugin shows me only number of G+ shares. I saw that few of you in comments have a same problem, so i’m wondering if someone found solution for this problem!

    Thanks

  16. First of all, I’ve loved your plugin, there was 2 observations that concerns me:
    1 – Do you plain to implement translation support?
    2 – Facebook REST API has changed to deprecaded, do you will gonna update to Graph API? I’ve done my own change on msp-fetch.php:121 when works just fine for me.
    [code]
    $facebook_api_results = @file_get_contents(“https://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?query=select total_count from link_stat where url='”. urlencode(get_permalink()).”‘&format=json”);
    [/code]

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    hello there and thank you in your information ?

  19. Today, I am searching some WordPress plug-in for my new website. In my website there is a problem about sharing post on different platform then I read your post about sharing on different site which is so good for my wordpress site. I am here now and I really thankful for your wordpress plug-in post and enjoyable your blog. After one to two day I will contact you about this plugin and its cost and Until take care yourself.

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