Just a quick note to let you know about some Mr Papa’s World website enhancements that have been added over the past few weeks.
You will notice the obtrusive social bookmarks with its multitude of icons is gone. While social bookmarking is still en vogue, the messy icons are not, so I have added a newer, easier method. In the post header information, you will now see a “Share this Post” link. That link will allow you to socially bookmark it or email the post to a friend. This plugin in comes courtesy of Alex King. I have done very minor tweaking to his fine mod.
I have also completely revamped the way comments are done and added a bit of ajax to them. If you click on the link that displays the number of comments, the comments will now immediately expand in place without reloading a page. From this comment expansion, you can also enter a new comment. This ajax plugin comes from Kashou but has been extensively modified to work with my site how I wanted it to.
I have replaced the post rating system with a popularity system. Not surprisingly, not many people were actually taking the time to vote for posts. I know I dont on sites that have them. I had installed that mostly to play with. The new post popularity system is automatic. It weights each post based on the number of home page views, number of permalink views, number of comments, etc. etc.. The post with the highest score gets 100%. So, each posts popularity will be a percentage of the highest post value. Since the post view counts are cumulative, newer posts will generally have lower scores, but it will even out over time. This plugin also comes from Alex King.
I also changed the theme layout slightly altering where some of the elements where located (ie comments vs similar posts). You can always see what plugins I am running here at Mr Papa’s World my plugin page.
As usual, I expect to continually be modifying and tweaking Mr Papa’s World as time goes by.
Ajax comments are always nice, whatever saves the end user a few clicks. One day I want to get Alex’s Popularity Contest plugin working, but it has issues when used along with WPG2.
Nice changes, keep it up.
Hmmm… what are the issues? I ask since I am running both the popularity and WPG2 and havent noticed any issues…
Mr Papa
Really? I tried and ran into the same issue a user documented here:
wordpress.org/support/topic/53844
“Table ‘DOMAIN.wp_ak_popularity’ doesn’t exist”
Basically it seems Popularity contest uses a call that WPG2 changes. I haven’t looked into hard coding that call yet.
I’m sorry, that was badly explained. I made it sound like the table simply isn’t there. Rather, WPG2 seems to change the path the table is looked for. Here’s the exact message:
Table ‘tp_gallery2.wp_ak_popularity’ doesn’t exist on line: 1340
Note how it’s looking in tp_gallery2. This is the only thing that appears on the page when Popularity Contest is loaded past the header.
Odd because I dont have any issues with both running… Also, that function that’s giving you the error, is not called as part of the “normal” operation of popularity… It’s only a special purpose call to get the top 10 popular posts…
Is the popular % for each post displaying correctly? And only the page/block where you are trying to display the top posts not working?
Mr Papa
It actually won’t show any of the blog content as soon as I activate the plugin, as is. I did more digging on the issue and found some modified code from an old beta version that seemed to work, but also appeared rather slow. He had preformed several tweaks including setting $ak_popularity_options_table as a global.
From what I’ve read there’s a few other plugins that may mess with the current version, including a Google Sitemaps plugin which I’m also using. Alex himself doesn’t seem to keen on fixing it, as he considers it a problem of another plugin. Oh well. Basically, it’ll take some work if I hope to fix it.
You may be interested to know that along with Mr. Kashou’s AJAX plugin, there’s also some manual hacks you can do to submit and display a new comment using AJAX as well, without refresh. I implemented it over the weekend and it seems to be working fine. Just do the included instructions both to your comments.php, and to your ajax-comments.php file in the plugin. Instructions here:
zeo.unic.net.my/notes/wordpress-ajax-commenting-revisited/
I will have to take a look at that… I already modded the plugin to show the add comment and submit stuff in the ajax portion… not sure what is meant by display new comment, so will take a gander at it… thanks… good luck on the popularity… its always tough when plugins collide… you can check my plugins page to see which I have installed to narrow down your list to look at since it works here…
Mr Papa
I also run the Share this plugin but I realized that it does not validate. I made a revised version that validates.
Thanks for the heads up… I will check it out…
I came across this site because I have the same problem with Alex’s popularity contest and Gallery. I get this Table ‘database_name.wp_ak_popularity’ doesn’t exist. I was hoping to find an answer on this page. 🙂
Oh well!
Great site btw.
Thanks Kris! You might try contacting Rirath and seeing if he ever solved the problem…