A while back, I posted a list of the best plugins for a Wordpress site. I even created a plugin starter pack. Well, now it’s time to amend both to make way for a plugin I’ve recently discovered.

Previously, I’d included a recommendation for the old-school related posts plugin and put the plugin in the starter pack. But frankly, I was less-than-thrilled with it. I preferred it to the other related post plugins I’d seen, but it was a real pain to install (seriously, I had to go into MySQL!) and you had little control over what it thought was or wasn’t related.

It’s called Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and the general instructions for download/use are on the plugin page. You can download the updated plugin pack here.

Things I like about YARPP:

1. You can “disallow” categories and tags. This means that on my personal blog, for example, I can disallow my “Roundup” category from related posts. In theory, this means that posts which are only in the “Roundup” category shouldn’t even show up.

2. You can emphasize, deemphasize, or require commonalities. You do this by setting an overall “match threshold” and then adjusting the match settings for each area. So I have titles considered with extra weight for the match, but tags not considered at all. I do require one category in common, which probably overrides the “Roundup” category issue I mentioned above . . . but only on roundup posts.

Because this blog is so new, I have a much lower match threshold, something like 1.5. The smaller or less inter-related your blog, the lower your match threshold should be.

If you click to view the full-size image below, you can get a good idea of how to do these settings.

3. You can style the way you want the items to appear. As you can see in the image below, I want an <h3></h3> before the list. I could also apply a class to the <ul> or <li> surrounding the list. They could have stars instead of squares, or be bright pink, or do something sensible. I could even include a link at the end to the archives page.

Of course, it would be easy enough to write this styling in the code itself, but I like the simplicity of putting it once here and having it show up wherever you put the <?php related_posts(); ?> call. And if you want to change things, you simply go back to the plugin management area and change the code there. Neat and tidy.

4. You can limit relatedness to only posts or only pages. Or you can cross-relate if you want. There are codes for calling only posts, or only pages, or anything, as well as a place you can check off in the plugin management area. I don’t like having pages show up in related posts, especially since they’re often available elsewhere on the page.

Updating the Plugin Pack

So as you can imagine, I’ve updated the plugin starter pack to include the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. I’m very pleased to have run across it and grateful to its creator for giving us so much control over our Related Posts options.

Download the updated plugin pack here and the contact form plugin here.

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