Popular Posts | inventivo

WordPress has no built-in widget for popular posts. This plugin adds one.

The widget lists published posts ordered by the number of comments they received, so the posts your readers talked about most appear first. Each entry shows the featured image, the post title, the publication date and the comment count.

The widget can be placed in any widget area your theme provides, for example a sidebar or a footer.

What it does

• Adds one widget called “inventivo: Popular Posts”.
• Lets you set a title and the number of posts to show, between 1 and 20.
• Orders posts by comment count, highest first.
• Shows the featured image only when the post has one.
• Loads its stylesheet only on pages where the widget is actually rendered.

What it does not do

• No tracking of page views, and no visitor data is collected or stored.
• No connection to any external service.
• No settings page, no database tables, no scheduled tasks.
• No JavaScript in the frontend.

Ordering

“Popular” here means “most commented”. The plugin deliberately does not count page views, because counting views requires either tracking visitors or an external service, and this plugin does neither.