The Best Wordpress plugin series – part 1 – Similar Posts

As i wanted to increase the number of page views per visitor, i decided to look for an easy to use plugin for Wordpress 2.1 that will help me to automatically display related posts within my Wordpress loop.

I first test Related Posts, and got a bit disappointed. I kept searching and found Similar Posts , whichis pretty much a sort of “Related Posts” on steroids .

The installation process is fairly simple:

1. Download the plugin files from here

2. Upload the Similar Posts directory to your plugin directory

3. In Wordpress, go to Options and activate the plugin.

4. In case it fails (like in my install), open your PHP MyAdmin and paste the SQL query code provided in the Instructions here.

5. From the “Presentation>> Theme Editor tab in Wordpress, open your index.php file (called Main Index Template).

6. Paste the following code within your WP loop: <?php similar_posts(); ?>

7. Go to the Options tab and configure your plugin options. Here you can take advantage of some powerful features such as: excluding posts, authors and categories. Note that this functionality is not available from out-of-the-box in the “Related Posts” plugin.

8. You are done. The entire process should take you around 5-7 minutes!

Thanks to Rob Marsh for writing and supporting this nice plugin.

Hope you found this post useful. Comments are welcome.

[tags] Similar Posts, Related Posts, Wordpress[/tags]