Content popularity

[Morthian]

I want to have a section on my site that shows the most popular content. I see this on a lot of sites, but I have no idea how to do it myself. Could anyone help me out with this?

[Morthian]

By the way, just if I wasn't clear, when I say content I mean records in a database. For example, Newgrounds shows its most popular flash submissions on its Portal page. DeviantArt does the same sort of thing with art submissions. I think somehow sorting records by the most views in the last week might be a good way of showing the "most popular" items. But like I said, I would have no clue how to actually do this.

[chriscloyd]

Well content im taking it means news.  In the news table you need to make a column  called views.  Then when someone clicks the link to view the news u need to have a script at the top of that page to update the views for that news.  So day you had a link like www.mysite.com/viewnews.php?id=4 then at the top of the page

you would do

<?php
$get_news_views = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `table_name` WHERE news_id = '".$_GET['id']."'") or die(mysql_error());
$news_views = mysql_fetch_array($get_news_views);
$views = $news_views['views'] + 1;
mysql_query("UPDATE `table_name` SET views = '".$views."' WHERE news_id = '".$_GET['id']."'") or die(mysql_error());
?>

[Morthian]

Yes, I know how to record a total number of views. I am asking how to record the number of views in a given time, such as a day or a week. On GameSpot, the popularity of the games is based on total unique views from yesterday. Since my site is certainly not as well known as GameSpot, I figure it would be better to base the popularity of content on views from the last week, or last 7 days. How can I do this?

[HeyRay2]

You could make a new table in your DB called "views", have track the following fields:

 

content_id (int) (unique)

views (int)

date (date)

 

When the page is accessed, check if a DB row already exists for that content that day and update it. Otherwise create a new row.

 

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM views WHERE content_id = $content_id and date = NOW()

 

Then when you want to run a query for the most popular items in a specific time frame, simply run a query that looks for the highest views later than a certain date, and limit the results to however many items you want to show.

 

SELECT * FROM views WHERE date > $limit_date ORDER BY views DESC LIMIT 5