Similar Posts WordPress Plugin Review

Jul 21, 2010 by Shivendu Madhava

The Similar Posts plugin compares posts by comparing their words. MySQL has a sophisticated full-text searching facility with a carefully tuned algorithm for judging the similarity between texts. Similar Posts extracts representative words from a post’s content, title, and tags and uses the full-text index to find the best matches between posts. This simple approach gives surprisingly good results.

The results can be tweaked in several ways to tailor them for you blog. By default the plugin chooses the 20 most frequent words to make its matches but the number is adjustable. It is worth experimenting to see how many words gives the best results for your blog — it has hardly any impact on speed, even if you set the value high enough to include the whole post. The relative importance given to words in your title may be adjusted so that well-chosen titles can be used to advantage or titles with little relevance downplayed. Similarly, tags can be used to improve matching or not according to your blog and it’s needs.

It is also possible to override the automatic similarity ranking by using a custom field. In the post edit screen create a custom field called ’sp_similar’ with the ID value of the post to which you wish to ‘link’. You can link to multiple posts by entering a comma-delimited list of IDs.

The plugin has a settings page which lets you change how the output is generated and displayed. There is also a management page where you can change settings which affect the index.

This plugin requires the latest version of the Post-Plugin Library download it.

Installation:

1. IMPORTANT! If you are upgrading from a previous version first deactivate the plugin, then delete the plugin folder from your server.
2. If you have the Similar Posts Feed plugin installed you must deactivate it before installing Similar Posts (which now does the same job).
3. Upload the plugin folder to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder. If you haven’t already you should also install the Post-Plugin Library.
4. Go to the Plugins page and activate the plugin.
5. Put <?php similar_posts(); ?> at the place in your template where you want the list of related posts to appear or use the plugin as a widget.
6. Use the Settings/Similar Posts page to adjust the behaviour of the plugin.

Download:Similar Posts

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