Wordpress 2.5 Problem with Popularity Contest

If you are not using Popularity Contest on your Wordpress blog, you should. It is recommended by Jack Humphrey in his Authority Black Book. I have been using it for quite some time and have found it to be excellent. It employs a basic algorith to work out which of your posts are the most popular, based on views, comments, trackbacks, etc. You can then display (as I have in the right column) those most popular posts, putting their relative value in the hands of your readers. That’s what Web 2.0 is all about.

Imagine my horror then, when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 and found that I couldn’t activate Popularity Contest! It gave the dreaded “Fatal Error” message. It’s a shame the message doesn’t tell you what caused that fatal error message.

After searching for an answer, it appears that (if you already have it installed), all you have to do is open popularity-contest.php (look for it in “Plugin Editor” under the “Plugins” tab in the admin area of your blog), scroll down to line 59 and replace

require(’../../wp-blog-header.php’);

with

require(’../wp-blog-header.php’);

In other words, just take out one of the ../

If you are activating Popularity Contest for the first time, go to Ken McGuire’s blog and follow his instructions on setting up a table in mySQL.

I added Popularity Contest to a new blog that I recently set up for a few friends after Wordpress 2.5 was released. I changed the 59th line in Popularity-Contest, but I still couldn’t activate the plugin. I created a new table as Ken said and it works perfectly.

Popularity: 14% [?]

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