Today I updated my Popularity contest plugin. When I tried to update the plugin with the latest version available on Alex King’s website, I received a fatal error in the admin console. After reading the reviews and updates on some blogs and forums, I came to know that the Popularity contest plugin has become outdated for wordpress 2.6 series. Also Alex is not showing any interest in releasing the update of this plugin. I was shocked as it caused me loss of popularity information of old articles. At the same time, after some searching I got the solution to this problem at Guatewireless.org.

There I found hack of Popularity contest plugin 1.4 and it was available for free download. This plugin supports WordPress 2.6.2 and higher versions. As I had already older version of Popularity Contest I did not have to create the database tables. Just I replaced the old popularitycontest.php file with the new one available on Guatewireless.org. After this change the popularity contest plugin started working fine. However if you are going for fresh installation you need to create the tables by firing this query in your phpmyadmin console.

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;

In case of any difficulty while installation, feel free to contact me.