I am very pleased to report that I have been researching and testing a few different WordPress plugins with regards to showing related posts on this blog. After doing my usual online research I also read a few reviews and also visited the developers website of each plugin. Once I had my top 4 choices it was just a matter of reading up on each option and then crossing them off until I had found a plugin that I was happy with.
In the end I decided to settle with the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin by mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine). The plugin also known as YARPP for short is really a great tool for any blog and then installation was smooth and quick. The screen shot above shows the result of the tool for my post on Fantastico cPanel Hosting – CMS.
As you can see the filter works amazingly well as the first related post is perfect and it would definitely suit the reader of the original post as it is on the exact same topic, being Fantastico.
Another advantage is the wonderful amount of options that are available in terms of the settings, and the Automatically display related posts option means that this plugin requires no programming at all for it to be installed, so no messing with the PHP code or anything like that. One thing that needs to be done after installation is the moving of the 6 YARPP template files from the plugin folder to your theme folder, but this is easy to do with FileZilla.
Here is a list of the key features of the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin:
- An advanced and versatile algorithm: Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog. You choose the threshold limit for relevance and you get more related posts if there are more related posts and less if there are less.
- Templating: New in 3.0! The YARPP templating system puts you in charge of how your posts are displayed.
- Caching: Improved in 3.1! YARPP organically caches the related posts data as your site is visited, greatly improving performance.
- Related posts in RSS feeds: Display related posts in your RSS and Atom feeds with custom display options.
- Disallowing certain tags or categories: You can choose certain tags or categories as disallowed, meaning any page or post with such tags or categories will not be served up by the plugin.
- Related posts and pages: Puts you in control of pulling up related posts, pages, or both.
So go ahead and take your blog to a new level, having a related posts plugin is a great idea – just another way to give your readers what they want!
Here is the home page for the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: http://mitcho.com/code/yarpp/
My rating: 5 Star – great plugin 🙂
Daniel Hall
