When I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 I had to disable that plug-in. Stewart Mader posted the fix for using Alex King’s Popularity Contest with WordPress 2.5. Thanks to Stewart it’s back up and running.

In the WordPress admin area, choose Plugins, then scroll down to Popularity Contest, and click Edit. Scroll down until you see this bit of code:

if (!isset($wpdb)) {
require('../../wp-blog-header.php');
akpc_init();
}

Remove one of the ../ from:

require('../../wp-blog-header.php');

Also, Popularity Contest is what powers my Top Posts widget on the right hand side of the blog. Thanks to Dean Sykes at Tech Teapot for authoring that handy little widget.

Technorati Tags: 2.5, plugins, Popularity Contest, Top Posts, Widget, WordPress

I have been blogging for many years. During that time I have used many other platforms including hosted software from BlogCity. TypePad, and Blogger. I also used Moveable Type briefly and a highly customized version of Joomla! (before that MamboCMS). Last fall I switched to WordPress as my primary blog platform. Though I haven’t been bowled over by WordPress I have come to the conclusion that it is the best blogging platform for me because it’s easy-to-use, has the widest variety of features, extensible, and it’s open source (with a thriving community of developers– over 90 developers were credited with contributing to this release).

Yesterday the long awaited and somewhat delayed WordPress 2.5 was released. Today, I updated my installation today and though I had a few problems the upgrade to the new version was definitely worth it.

Read the full story

Technorati Tags: Blog, compatibility, Google Analytics, Gregarious, Joomla!, Open Source, plugins, Popularity Contest, review, Software, WordPress

I normally read Tech Teapot for their systems management content but this week I have been looking for a widget that compliments the Popularity Contest plug-in for Wordpress. I was surprised to find that Dean Sykes of Open Xtra had a nice widget for displaying your most popular posts. I just cranked it up on my sidebar and it’s working like a charm.   

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Plug-in, Popularity Contest, Tech Teapot, tools, Widget, WordPress