How to Display Most Popular Posts from a Specific Category

26th Jan 2011 | Posted by reza | 16 Comments

There are many way to make visitor browsing more pages in your WordPress Blog. One of them is showing most popular post on your sidebar or footer. This also help your visitors finding your best content. Most popular here I mean, most commented posts

How to display most popular post from specific category

There tons article out there to display the popular posts, one of them is our article : Display your Most Popular Posts with Thumbnails

Display Most Popular Post from Specific Category

But, what if the popular posts We want to display are from a single category only? This is very useful if We have a category We want to promote, by displaying its popular posts

Ok, I’ll share the solution here. Put the code below, in your theme sidebar or wherever You want to display your popular posts from specific category



<?php
$args=array(
  'cat' => 3,
  'orderby' => 'comment_count',
  'order' => 'DESC',
  'post_type' => 'post',
  'post_status' => 'publish',
  'posts_per_page' => 6,
  'caller_get_posts'=> 1
);
$my_query = null;
$my_query = new WP_Query($args);
if( $my_query->have_posts() ) { ?>
	<ul>
	<?php while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
	<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
	<?php  endwhile; ?>
	</ul>
<?php }

wp_reset_query(); ?>

Explanation

'cat' => 3,

replace 3 with category ID you want to display

'posts_per_page' => 6,

This is to set how much post You want to display. Here, 6 posts.

Hope this tutorial helps

Credit:
Thanks to mkjar and MichaelH from WordPress.org

8 Comments to “How to Display Most Popular Posts from a Specific Category”

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kumbi says:

February 10, 2011 at 08:02

great post! great snippet! can i generate this list based on the number of page views without resorting to a plugin?

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Matteo says:

February 13, 2011 at 11:22

Great snippet, but i have a question: is it possibile to limit popular post per category selecting only last 7 or 30 days?

Thank you in advance

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nivin says:

March 16, 2011 at 23:28

it is nice

Reply
Pieter says:

April 19, 2011 at 00:34

Too bad it doesn’t work on a custom post type single page…

Reply
Muzza says:

May 6, 2011 at 19:28

Nice! One question: how would you go about category ID relevant to the page you’re on?

Example;

I want to pull out the most popular post (14 days) per category on the category.php pages…

Thoughts?

Reply
Diogo92 says:

July 20, 2011 at 03:40

Thank you!!! You saved my life

Reply
lowestofthekeys says:

November 19, 2012 at 13:57

Awesome code man, you’re lifesaver. I scoured the web for hours trying to find a decent plugin to do the same thing, fortunately I decided to change what I was looking for and found this.

Also, works great with CSS.

Reply
Abe says:

April 15, 2013 at 18:56

I’ve try but It doesn’t work for my site, I’ve try to add this script to a page that shown my popular post but the result is not displaying post by most views

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