I’ve always wondered how my making money online mentor, Marhgil, added related posts to his blog. His blog is among the few that I emulated since I started with pinoyism.com. However, I did not put too much attention to related post plugin until today.
I searched Google and came across Matt Cutt’s article Best WordPress Plugin for Related Posts?. Four plugins were most recommended to him but I only tried two - Yet Another Related Post Plugin (YARPP) and Similar Posts. I tried YARPP first and it was very easy to install. Configuring it was another matter. I did not quite understand the match system. And despite tweaking the settings (such as match threshold, titles, bodies, tags and categories), I did not get the output I wanted. I also thought that having only few categories affected the output.
So I downloaded and installed the Similar Post plugin by Rob Marsh. It required installing Post-Plugin Library before it can be activated. Out of the box, it gave me a better output than YARPP but still did not meet my requirements. I ended up removing my child categories. And although the links still worked, I went through all my posts and corrected them. I also corrected forum signatures that were optimized for certain posts. Finally, I got the output I wanted with the following settings in the Similar Post Plugin:
Output Settings
Output template: <li>{link}<br></li>
Default display if not matches: Check out my posts on <a href=”http://www.pinoyism.com/category/making-money-online/”><strong>making money online</strong></a>.
Sort output by: {date:y, m d} descendingPlacement Setting:
Output after post: prefix=<br><br><br>Related Posts:<ul>&suffix=</ul>
There is a con to the Similar Post Plugin that I noticed. It destroys the formatting of the content once I include {excerpt} and snippet in the Output template. Feel free to leave a comment if you know how to include similar post excerpt without affecting the content formatting.
Additional resources for Similar Post plugin output setting.
Formatting Date and Time
PHP: Date Manual
NOTE: As of this writing, I learned Marhgil is using Wasabi related_post plugin for Macuha.com related posts.
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