Jonny Atlas Writes

My site is not going to become a tech blog, I swear! I just want to help out anyone who has to go through what I just went through.

For those of you who may be updating WP and using or installing the Popularity Contest plugin, I thought I would help save you some pain and suffering. As is, the plugin won’t work with 2.5. Thankfully, some brilliant people have figured out what to do.

Andrew Daum gives you step by step instructions on how to fix the php for the plugin itself. It’s a quick and easy fix.

If you’re like me, and you decided to install Pop. Contest AFTER updating WP, well… you’ve only just begun. Thankfully Ken McGuire had this to say:

…in running the plugin locally I found that after making the changes in order to get the plugin to activate, it wouldn’t create the two tables needed in order to run, so these had to be entered manually (via phpMyAdmin). To create the tables, you’ll need to run the following SQL queries.

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `PREFIX_ak_popularity` (
`post_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`total` int(11) NOT NULL,
`feed_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`home_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`archive_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`category_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`single_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`comments` int(11) NOT NULL,
`pingbacks` int(11) NOT NULL,
`trackbacks` int(11) NOT NULL,
`last_modified` datetime,
KEY `post_id` (`post_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `PREFIX_ak_popularity_options` (
`option_name` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
`option_value` varchar(50) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

Note that PREFIX refers to your Wordpress table prefix, in most common cases it is simply wp_ unless you’ve got multiple copies of Wordpress running in the same database.





If your webhosting doesn’t provide you write access privileges in phpMyAdmin (like mine), there’s an easy work around that. Just create a new text document in notepad, copy the code from above, paste it into the text doc, save it as wp_ak_popularity (or whatever), and use the “import” function in phpMyAdmin. It will run the code and create the tables.

Hope this helps!

Now back to my standard topics…

Popularity: 37% [?]