Improvements to the popular posts widget

[philipt18]

There are three things that would make that popular posts widget better (IMHO):

1. Being able to select Posts, Pages or Both

2. Being able to select one or more categories as a filter (as include or exclude)

3. Being able to define the time period. Right now I think it's a rolling popularity over 24-48 hours? That seems odd to me as only very high traffic sites with many posts per day would benefit from that. For most sites, they'd want to be able to set it to a month, or a year, or from the beginning of the site.

[jeherve]

Being able to select Posts, Pages or Both

That's something we've been working on #54. Feel free to subscribe to that issue to follow our progress on this.

Being able to select one or more categories as a filter (as include or exclude)

We created the jetpack_widget_get_top_posts filter in 9f45741, that will allow you to do just that. It's not part of Jetpack yet, but it will be included in the next release.

Being able to define the time period.

You can use the jetpack_top_posts_days filter to change the timeframe (ref). It was added to Jetpack in 2.8.

I hope this helps.

[philipt18]

Concerning #54, that's a closed issue, so would subscribing to it actually get updates?

Concerning the filters, are those available in the widget? If not, then I don't see why this should be closed. I'm suggesting those be added to the widget.

[georgestephanis]

#54 is actually open. The closed you're seeing, I believe refers to this issue (#330) being closed in the linkback.

[jeherve]

are those available in the widget?

These filters are indeed available with the Top Posts widget. For example, if you wanted to change the timeframe used by the Top Posts widget to 30 days, you could use the following code in a functionality pluginto hook into the jetpack_top_posts_days filter:

function jeherve_top_posts_timeframe() {
    return '30';
}
add_filter( 'jetpack_top_posts_days', 'jeherve_top_posts_timeframe' );

[philipt18]

So to get this functionality with the Top posts widget, I need to install another plugin and addd custom php code? I'm not saying I can't do that, but my request was to add this functionality into the widget directly. That's the feature request - to add it to the widget directly.

[jeherve]

So to get this functionality with the Top posts widget, I need to install another plugin and addd custom php code?

That's correct. We've chosen not to add these options to the widget itself, not to overload the widget settings with too many options. Jetpack includes many filters (306 at the moment) to allow you to customize the default behaviour of the plugin without having to edit the core plugin files.

We are, however, considering adding a Post Type option, as per #54.

I hope this clarifies things a bit.