If you head over to the plugins site of wordpress, you will notice that the amount of blog statistics plugins are many.  One of the most popular one is WordPress.com Stats plugin.  It allows you to use the stats system that they use over at WordPress.com on your self hosted blog which is pretty neat because plugin is pretty accurate compare to the other stats plugin.

Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.

The reason I use this plugin is its accuracy on collecting pageviews.  For my new three column wordpress theme design, I thought I would put the most popular posts according to “WordPress.com Stats Plugin” in my right sidebar. Plugin doesn’t have any specifications on how you can managed to get those posts listed in your template.So  I google searched it to see if anyone created a plugin to achieve that and couldn’t find anything.  I tried better keywords and I have found WordPress.com Popular Posts.  It’s widget supported so you don’t have to know any PHP for those who are not familiar with WordPress templates.

If you click on that link that I provided above will take you the plugin’s homepage at author’s site, here is the link to plugin’s page at WordPress.org.

How to use it in your template?

<?php if (function_exists('WPPP_show_popular_posts')) WPPP_show_popular_posts(); ?>

This will list the first five most popular posts. You might want to try to visit the plugin homepage at author’s site to see how you can add different specifications like posts views or to read the comments if you are having a problem with the plugin. There are some other parameters you can use as well.