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?

This guest post was written by John Pratt who blogs about blogging, WordPress, and his life as a webmaster. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

Improving the navigation in your blog means visitors will find MORE of your content, and return MORE often. Even with the best content and lots of traffic – the most important thing is that people can QUICKLY find what they were looking for from the first moment they enter your blog!

I’m going to give you 10 different ways you can improve the navigation in your blog that anyone can (and should) implement for better usability when you have a WordPress powered blog. You will be surprised how much easier it will be to find content by using these techniques.

10 Steps to Improved WordPress Navigation

1. Add Breadcrumbs: This is a very easy fix, and one I don’t see on many blogs. Breadcrumbs are the simple link trail on the top of a web page like this: “Home -> Page -> SubPage”. It’s easy to add breadcrumbs, just use a 2.6+ compatible plugin like “Breadcrumb NavXT.
2. Get rid of Ugly Next and Previous Links: Every WordPress homepage, and any page that has lists of blog posts (search, archive), has simple “next” and “previous” links to navigate older posts. I have witnessed (countless times) visitors thinking that all the posts you had to offer were listed on the homepage and that was it (mainly people not familiar with WordPress). You should have a linked list of pages (like google) that says “this is page 1 of…” and links to “2, 3, 4, 5, etc”. It’s easy to fix this with plugins like WP-PageNavi or WP-Page Numbers.
3. Bold Pagination on Single Pages: You can’t use the last trick on single pages, but every single (post) page has links at the bottom to view the next and previous page as well. I edit my “single.php” file to change that text to something like “Post before this one” and “Post after this one”, and align them left and right (bolded). You can style them any way you want – the point is to make them stand out. Visitors often come from SERP’s to a single post page, make it easy for them to view other ones as well.
4. More Links and Excerpts: This is personal preference really, but I prefer to have post excerpts on pages instead of the entire post, because I feel it clutters up pages and makes everything run together (on most blogs). I like to encourage people to visit the single post page to read the entire thing. There are a couple ways to change a running post page (like search results, archives, index.php) to show excerpts. On your homepage, you can use the Homepage excerpts plugin to achieve this. On all other pages, just the “the loop” and change the_content to the_excerpt.
5. Multi-Paged Navigation: If you ramble on like I do, some of your posts can be dreadfully long. Break them up into multi-pages posts using a plugin like Multi-Page Toolkit. It’s not only better usability, but it creates multiple post pages so you can get more indexed in the search engines.
6. Related Posts: What better way to get people to stay on your blog than by recommending to them “related posts” that you’ve written?! All it takes is a plugin like Related Posts.
7. Most Viewed Posts: Like an MVP of the game – you should be showing your visitors your most valuable content! Lester Chan has a great plugin called WP Post Views that has a sidebar widget than can display your most viewed posts! This is a great way to showcase your best posts and keep people on your blog.
8. Most Popular Posts: Alex King has a plugin called Popularity Contest that displays how popular posts are.
9. Category Images: Having your categories a post is assigned to listed and linked is a great way to get visitors to view everything else you have posted in that category, but sometimes (like “ad blindness) readers are blinded to post meta info. Solve that by assigning images to your categories, so that they stand out prominently! All you need is the Category Icons plugin.
10. Sidebar Navigation: There are a bazillion options for pimping out your sidebar, and most bloggers seem to just liste categories, archives, and a blogroll. Check out all of the WordPress Widgets available, the WordPress Codex page for “Customizing Your Sidebar”, the List Authors widget, Parent Pages widget, and especially the WordPress plugin iFrameWidgets. The iframe widgets one is great if you use myBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Entrecard, or other third party widgets that may slow the load time of your blog.

By following these 10 steps to better navigation, your visitors will STAY LONGER and READ MORE each and every time they visit your blog. This article was a synopsis of my in depth article WordPress Hack #5: 10 Ways to Improve Navigation. Happy Hacking!

The seventh month of 2008 is now complete and this blog is celebrating the completion of its tenth month of existence. Hack WordPress has continued to show excellent growth each month, so I like to wrap up each month with our popular posts for that month and also to thank everyone for supporting us through reading, comments, guest posts, and any inbound links you’ve sent mentioning the stuff you find here. It really is appreciated!

Here are some of last month’s most popular posts:

• How To: Adding Multiple Feeds to Your WordPress Dashboard – This was an excellent guest post by John Lamansky of WordPress Expert. 
• Is WordPress Distancing Themselves From the Competition? - In this post I discussed the popularity of the WordPress blogging platform and how it is starting to compete in the CMS market as well.
• The Importance of Upgrading Your WordPress Installation –  In this post, I shared some of my personal experiences with not upgrading WordPress in a timely fashion and discussed why doing so is so important. 
• How to Create an Archive Page for your WordPress Blog – Jean-Bapiste Jung of Cats Who Code wrote a great post explaining how you can build an archive page into your WordPress blog.
• Introducing the Success with WordPress eBook – In this post I introduced my new WordPress eBook designed to help people find Success with WordPress.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank this month’s sponsors:

• SkinPress – SkinPress provides a large variety of website templates, including over 60 free WordPress templates.
• PressBox – Pressbox is a new quality premium WordPress theme that is available with 3 different licenses to choose from. You can see a demo here.
• Mother Theme – Mother Theme is one premium WordPress theme that comes with a number of different skins for you to choose from. 

If you have WordPress themes, WordPress plugins, or other WordPress related products and services that you’d like to promote, we currently have a couple advertising spots available. Advertising rates may be going up soon, but all existing advertisers are grandfathered in at their existing rates, so now is a good time to sign up!  Please check out our advertising page, then contact us with questions or to get started!

The six month of 2008 is now complete and this blog is celebrating the completion of its ninth month of existence. Hack WordPress has continued to show excellent growth each month, so I like to wrap up each month with our popular posts for that month and also to thank everyone for supporting us through reading, comments, guest posts, and any inbound links you’ve sent mentioning the stuff you find here. It really is appreciated!

Here are some of last month’s most popular posts:

• Turn Your WordPress Blog Into an E-Commerce Site
• What Do You Think of Premium WordPress Themes?
• Maximize SEO with the SEO Sniper WordPress Plugin
• How To: Creating a Print Stylesheet for Your WordPress Blog
• How To: Resetting Your WordPress Password

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank this month’s sponsors:

• SkinPress – SkinPress provides a large variety of website templates, including over 60 free WordPress templates.
• PressBox – Pressbox is a new quality premium WordPress theme that is available with 3 different licenses to choose from.  You can see a demo here.

If you have WordPress themes, WordPress plugins, or other WordPress related products and services that you’d like to promote, we currently have a couple advertising spots available. Advertising rates may be going up soon, but all existing advertisers are grandfathered in at their existing rate for a few months, so now is a good time to sign up! Please check out our advertising page, then contact us if you are interested.

The fifth month of 2008 is now complete and this blog is celebrating the completion of its eighth month of existence. This site has continued to show excellent growth each month, so I like to wrap up each month with our popular posts for that month and also to thank everyone for supporting Hack WordPress through reading, comments, guest posts, and any inbound links you’ve sent mentioning the stuff you find here. It really is appreciated!

Here are some of last month’s most popular posts:

1. 50 Best Free WordPress Themes Gallery
2. Copyrighted Images – And the Ideal Solution
3. How To: Making a Categories Drop-Down Menu
4. Free Magazine Theme: OpenBook
5. News and Magazine Premium WordPress Themes Gallery
6. Collection of WordPress Resources

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank this month’s sponsor:

• SkinPress – SkinPress provides a large variety of website templates, including over 60 free WordPress templates.

If you have WordPress themes, WordPress plugins, or other WordPress related products and services that you’d like to promote, we currently have a couple advertising spots available. Advertising rates may be going up soon, but all existing advertisers are grandfathered in at their existing rate for a few months, so now is a good time to sign up! Please check out our advertising page, then contact us if you are interested.