Displaying a list of your most commented posts can be a great way to drive more traffic to your most valuable resources. This little code snippet, which can be pasted anywhere in your WordPress template files, will pull in a list of the five most commented upon posts on your site and display them in an unordered list.
<ul> <?php get_results("SELECT comment_count,ID,post_title FROM $wpdb->posts ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 0 , 5"); foreach ($result as $post) { setup_postdata($post); $postid = $post->ID; $title = $post->post_title; $commentcount = $post->comment_count; if ($commentcount != 0) { > <li><a href="<?php echo get_permalink($postid);>" title="<?php echo $title ?>"><!--show the post title as a link--> <?php echo $title ?></a> {<?php echo $commentcount ?>}</li><!--show the number of comments on the post--> <?php } } ?> </ul>
Looking for an example of what this does?
Popular Post List
This code snippet will allow you to generate a list of the most popular posts and display them anyway you choose, just apply your own CSS styling.
There are a lot of plugins out there that do this, but this method allows you to achieve the same result without using a plugin, which results in your site loading just a little faster. This is also an excellent trick for theme developers wishing to incorporate popular post lists as a feature in their themes, without requiring a plugin.
