Related and Popular Posts in WordPress

I noticed some blogs list at the end of the post other posts that are related to them. They also list the most popular posts.

To do related posts I first tried the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP). However I got some strange results like my post Wild Goose Chase – Yawning Angels being related to the posts WaMu Free Checking and Poisonous Wild Mushrooms. Also this plugin didn’t find any posts related to my Sort of Vegetarian post.

I next tried the WordPress Related Posts plugin but that did not work at all, I think it wasn’t updated for WordPress 2.7.1. So I went back to YARPP and configured it to not show excerpts, not promote the plugin, and to use a lower match threshold of 4.25.

For popular posts I first tried the WordPress Popular Posts plugin but it reported no popular posts.

Next I tried the WordPress.com Popular Posts plugin which uses WordPress.com Stats. Fortunately it works quite well even though I got a warning during installation that it had not been tested with WordPress 2.7.1. The only configuration change I made was to list the number of views for each post.

I always wanted to be popular.

Update 06-07-2009: I just found out that YARPP does not play well with User Permissions. If a post that is not protected has related posts that are protected then the User Permissions plugin redirects instead of allowing the user to see the unprotected post.