WordPress Thumby Related Posts Widget

Last Update

20 May 2013

Regular License

$12

Extended License

$60

Sales

30

Improve the effectiveness of your entry pages with an attractive and a charming related posts widget all in pictures!

Make your landing pages effectively causes visitors to view more pages and continue on deeper into your web site. Introduction You have a WordPress blog and you have done what is required to turn it into a fantastic high traffic web site. You definitively achieved and continue to assure with dynamism and perseverance everything you can on developing it with rich content, SEO and internet marketing… But strangely you notice that the outcome of your efforts are not reflected on stats… Pageviews, Avg time on Page, Bounce Rate, Ads impressions and eCPM… unfortunately web analytics persist to be fail your expectations… WP Thumby Related Posts can help you improve your stats because all those metrics can be better if your entry page can introduce the reader to other relevant content on your site … You get then many page views for the price of one!

Using WP Thmuby Related Posts, when visitors come in just for one entry, clean and high-quality thumbnails will attract them to see other stuff going on on your website. Features

Support custom post types and taxonomies Fully customizable widget template and style Theme sidebar widget and/or after posts content widget Adjustable maximum related posts number Variety ensured with a random order instead of the date based order Adaptable thumbnails size for well-groomed and optimizes pictures Customizable default thumbnail for imageless and only-text posts Internal caching system for better page load speed No “insecure” third party-libraries for image processing, only using internal built-in PHP and WordPress functions You can manually specify where to display related posts in theme templates via helper functions get_thumby_related_posts_html()

How thumbnails are chosen? WP Thumby Related Posts candidates are selected in the following order :

The plugin looks if the related post has a custom field defining an url as a thumbnail if not, it tests if a featured image was defined to retrieve it if not, it picks up the first related posts attachment if the post has no attachment, it searches for any eventual inserted images directly by its url by “grepping” the first IMG tag from the post content if not, finally the plugin doesn’t throw in the towel and use the default thumbnail you already set in the plugin settings page.

Details with screenshots here With this order, we can be certain that the most attractive image will be selected to describe the best related entry… and of course, cropped and resized images are cached for further reuse to save your server charge load. The related posts algorithm Bounce rate is one of the most terrifying metric for web marketers, a bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout. To prevent such a behavior, WP Thumby Related Posts plugin tries to suggest relevant posts to discover for your visitors basing on posts tags.

First of all, the plugin load the viewed posts tag list… if this list is empty, it turns the title into tags (What better than the title to describe the best a post? ). Those tags are searched in other posts tags, then other posts content… If no result was returned, you can optionally configure the plugin to include also categories in search, this will not be as relevant as tags but at least related posts will belong to the same view post segment.

This way, only pertinent related posts that really have a strong connection with the viewed post are served. Template functions You can manually specify where to display related posts in your theme template (eg. single.php) via the following helper:

get_thumby_related_posts_html($ID, $title, $max_cache_age, $max_w, $max_h, $max_posts, $random_posts, $default_thumb)

All parameters are optional; That means you can directly call get_thumby_related_posts_html() or echo_thumby_related_posts_html() for direct display

When no ID provided, the current global ID is taken For other arguments, when not provided, default values from settings page are taken.

$ID (int): Post’s ID $title (string): Widget title $max_cache_age (int): Number of seconds or 0 to disable $max_w (int): Width in pixel $max_h (int): Height in pixel $max_posts (int): Related posts number $random_posts (boolean): Random or date order $default_thumb (string): Default thumb URL for text-only posts

Examples:

echo_thumby_related_posts_html() echo_thumby_related_posts_html(null, “Related Posts”) //To specify the widget title echo_thumby_related_posts_html(null, null, 120, 120) //To specify thumbs width and height

Need a tweaked algorithm for your website, just contact me using my profile contact form and I will be happy to see how can I implement it for you.