Possibly my favorite WordPress plugin of all time has always been the Popularity Contest WordPress plugin from Alex King. Back when WordPress 2.5 first came out, there was a minor scare where Popularity Contest quit working on new WordPress blogs, but a fix was eventually published and once again all was right with the world.
Now that WordPress 2.7 has been released, I noticed the other day while setting up a couple new niche blogs that Popularity Contest appears to again be broken on fresh installations of WordPress 2.7. My WordPress installations which already had Popularity Contest installed and were upgraded to WordPress 2.7 seem to still be working fine.
While checking for updates on the authors page, I noticed that it appears that Popularity Contest (along with Alex’s other plugins) are no longer supported and will not receive any future updates. In fact, the last update was over a year ago. The only exception I know of is the Share This plugin, which I believe was purchased by someone who has continued to improve the plugin.
My hope with this post is that someone will either take over supporting this WordPress plugin (if Alex is willing to hand it over to someone), or that someone will create a similar plugin for the WordPress community. Heck, something like this that is supported and gets regular feature updates might even be something I would happily pay a one time fee for!
Anyone having luck with Popularity Contest and brand new WordPress 2.7 installations?
Kyle Eslick
Kyle Eslick is the founder and primary author of WordPress Hacks. You can learn more about him at KyleEslick.com or you can follow his personal tweets here.
Thanks for releasing this version. 
As your site has a lot of widgets, so I think it will significantly reduce the server usage. 
I'd love to do the 301 redirect, but it seems that with Wordpress's canonical URLs, redirects create infinite loops that ...
Great gallery. But I wasted 3 months to find a good free wordpress template and finally no one was customizable ...
yeah its working really fine in wp 2.7 and its makes blog quite awesome in look.
I’m right there with you! I was looking for it the other day, just to find that it’s been outdated. I also found that someone had revived it, but their version also went outdated. The solution I found was a plugin quite like it, but with a different perspective.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/recently-popular/
@ Dev – It does still work for blogs that already had it, but it doesn’t work with new blogs where the tables still need to be created upon activation. Instead it creates a fatal error. I’ve also tried other “fixed” versions of the plugin (including one that claimed it worked with WordPress 2.7), but none of them worked. I figured because I hadn’t found a fix yet, hopefully a post would help inspire someone to take over the plugin.
@ Stephen – That is interesting. I may have to check out that plugin!
I actually did a fresh wp 2.7 install with popularity contest. At first when i tried to bulk enable some plugins i got a table error. Then i removed popularity contest and activated all others. Once done with that i reuploaded the popularity plugin again and activated it.
It seems to be working now and i get no db errors and seems to be working just fine now.
To be sure i just looked at the stats and those are working too.
This doesn’t mean i won’t vote for someone to take over this great plugin though!
Popularity Contest is a great plugin, we hope that someone could get up with the updates
BTW, i am running it over WP 2.7 and it works!
I applied a couple of fix that you can find easily, before that iwas running but with minor problems… now it works!
My site has this plug-in. Other sites that I have don’t because I don’t need it. One potential workaround if you think your new blog will need this functionality is to install an older version of WP (say 2.3) originally, install the plug-in, and then upgrade the site to WP 2.7.
Are you trying to install it locally? I had problems activating it locally with fresh 2.7 intalls but it worked fine once I placed it on my server, which is hosted by ASmallOrange.com.
A little dated but here’s some info: http://wpguy.com/plugins/popularity-contest-plugin-compatibility-with-wordpress-25/
@ CP – That is the fix I wrote about above (here) which worked after WordPress 2.5 just fine. Unfortunately it isn’t working on WordPress 2.7 any longer for fresh installations.
Also, regardless of whether I can get it to work or not, my plea is for someone to take over support for this plugin or create a similar one that is supported.
My thoughts exactly. I’ve been meaning to revive the plugin by polishing it up for wp2.7, and add compatibility code for WP Super Cache, but I already have my hands full with supporting my current plugins
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I agree. I’ve been wondering about this same issue with this plugin for quite some time.
I got it working as well simply by activating it twice. It failed the first time on the bulk plugin activation I ran, but then worked the second time.
I’m using this plugin and not aware of this problem. Maybe, too much plugin installed.
I have not used it with 2.7 yet simply because I am reluctant to upgrade for fear of losing my theme and my plugins (not all of them work with 2.7).
I’d love to see someone take this over.
I have just installed the plugin on my WP 2.7 without having any problem at all.
Here ya go, these guys have fixed it.
http://www.guatewireless.org/popularity-contest-plugin-para-wordpress/
Someone wrote a fix for 2.7 version here: http://www.argee.org/tuts/fixing-the-popularity-contest-plugin/
I am yet to try it.
I found this hack to fix it for Wordpress 2.5 which worked with my Wordpress 2.7.1 — when no other fixes did.