Sidebar of blogs is vital area which is used for ads display, affiliate marketing and displaying Recent/Popular/ Most active type of posts. In this tutorial we will show you how to show your Popular Posts along with thumbnail in sidebars. Adding graphic support to your posts in sidebar will give them more visibility, because Pictures speak thousand words.
All we need is to get two plugins from Rob Marsh,
Post plugin library is required for coding support of all plugins from Rob Marsh. We install popular post plugin to display our most popular post at the sidebar.
Activate the plugins and go to settingàPopular Post options. Here you will see lot of option for configuration. Configure them as per your need and click output to design the output template.
Add this code to output template,
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="{url}"><img src="{custom:thesis_post_image}" width="50" height="50" alt="" /></a>
</td>
<td>
{link}
</td>
</tr>
</table>
You can further customize the output as per your requirement. Select size for thumbnail to be generated.
Note: – This is customized code to take benefit from thesis features.
Remove the code from “Text and codes before the list” and save your setting.
Now it is time to show the popular post along with thumbnail in the side bar. Go to Widgets and add Popular post widget to your desired sidebar. You have successfully activated Popular Post Plugin in sidebar.
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
I followed the directions in the video to a tee, and it worked great, except for one thing. When I checked my site, the social media icons were arranged (tiled) vertically, not horizontally.
Can you tell me how I can make sure they show up horizontally on the sidebar.
Also, the facebook icon isn’t showing up when people actually go to a specific post. Any suggestions on how to fix that?
Otherwise, great tutorial. Really helped me out. it took me a while to find this and finally figure out how to add the social media icons to my site.
.-= 911 Nation´s last blog ..996 GT2 & GT3 | Classics in Waiting? =-.
Sorry man! Wrong tutorial. I actually followed your instructions for inserting thumbnails in Popular Posts and it worked great. No problems at all. Thanks!
.-= 911 Nation´s last blog ..996 GT2 & GT3 | Classics in Waiting? =-.
Hello,
How I can do this with Recent Posts instead of Popular Posts?
Please help
Yes Ahmed you can, just follow the same procedure and use recent post plugin instead of popular post plugin. Even popular post plugin can also serve the purpose. All you need to set a month time period in plugin setting option.
So, does that mean the process will be similar for related posts too? I use yet another related plugins though.
Kindly advice.
Plugins offered from rmarsh[dot]com will serve the purpose with same settings.
can you combine this with a tabbed widget?
Can this be done without using a plugin?
thanks trick help me lot in develop my new theme
Nice post and thanks for it. Is not there another way to show popular post with thumbs without using any plugin? It is said that use of plugins excessively increases the page load time.
Hi ! Thanks for code but i have a problem here
I am unable to see thumbnails ! There is blank space reserved for thumbnails but it doesnt appear
Every post has atleast 1 pic and i dont have any wp cache plugin actuvated . Do we need to select pic as a thumbnail for each post to see it in sidebar or does it automatically select the 1st pic in the post ?
Yes it should pick first image in the post for thumbnails