vBulletin CMS Widgets - Top posters widget type

What does this do?
This mod provides a Top Posters widget type which can be configured to show the members who made the most posts over a period of time.

Features

• Provides widget type Top Posters.
• Displays a list of the top posters on your forum inside a widget.
• Allows multiple instances of the widget.
• Easy installation via products system.
• Configuration options:
  • Usergroups to include
  • Eight different time periods to choose from
  • Number of posters to display.
• Displays avatar of 'top poster'

Potential features

• Exclude forum(s) from counting
• Exclude forum(s) with no post count
• Top all time posters (eg based on post count)
• Top bloggers widget
• Top article posters widget
• Top social groups widget
• Top posted in forums widget
• Top posted in threads widget
• Top commented on album/blog/articles widget

Installation
1. Upload the contents of the upload folder to your site.
2. Import product file.
3. Clear CMS cache. (failing to do this may mean the widget doesn't show up in the create new widget box)

Usage
1. Go into the widget manager and select Create new widget.
2. Select the top posters widget type from the drop down list.
3. Fill out the remaining form items and hit save.
4. Configure the widget from the widget manager.
5. Add the widget to a layout.

What is an Alpha release?
This modification has been released as an Alpha release. This means that it has only been tested within a limited number of environments, eg My development board and boards of a small number of other users. As far as I'm aware, all releases are bug free at the time of release, but due to the limited number of users not all the bugs may have been found yet.

As with all mods, make a full backup of your database before installing and ideally, test on a development board which matches the setup of your live board as closely as possible first. Please report any issues you have and any solutions you find, to help improve this product.

Changelog

• 4.0-0.1 a2
  • Fixed issue with configuring widget on vb 4.1
  • Added avatar of top poster to widget.
• 4.0-0.1 a1
  • Initial release

Notes

• I created this widget because the existing ones that do similar things had performance issues and the mod author was unwilling/slow to implement the fix I sent them. This behaives much more reasonably, even in the worst case (top posters this year) It takes a little over a second when run against my 1.2 million posts board. Considering that this result is cached for a day, the performance implications of this widget are minimal.
• Caching behaivour can only be changed by editing the code; currently the last* time periods cache the result to the end of the time period (eg if you are using last month, the cache is set to expire about 1 minuite after the start of the next month) For this year and this month, the cache is set to expire after a day, this week is set to expire after 6 hours and today is set to expire hourly. A future version may allow customisation over these timings.
• The Planned features are a set of ideas that I could do using the current code fairly easilly; however most are not required for my own use, if there are sufficient people interested in a feature to make it worth my while coding it, I will do.
• This is an example of how to write a widget properly and I used the direct php execution widget as a model of how to implement it. Please feel free to use this code as an example when creating your own widgets types.

[Bergler]

Sounds like a great mod!! When will these features be completed?


Potential features

• Exclude forum(s) from counting
• Exclude forum(s) with no post count
• Top all time posters (eg based on post count)
• Top bloggers widget
• Top article posters widget
• Top social groups widget
• Top posted in forums widget
• Top posted in threads widget
• Top commented on album/blog/articles widget

[EDIT] Just installed, nice widget, can wait for the above to be created!

[Carnage]

The list of potential features are there as examples of what I might add, essentially based upon demand. If there is any specific widget/ feature you are interested in lemme know.

[rck3]

Installed and works but the display is off. It shows the first name and then no # of posts, it shows the 2nd name with the # of posts for the 1st name, and continues until you end up with no name and the # of post for the last name. So the post column is off by 1 line of the name column. It shows on the demo site and also my SRULife.Com

[Carnage]

which browser are you using? I've checked in IE8, chrome and firefox and can't reproduce your error

[rck3]

Yeah I checked firefox and chrom which look fine. I usually use IE8 and it is off on the display. Odd if you don't have the issue with IE8.

[Carnage]

I'm going home in a few days and will be using a different machine for a while; its possible that i'll be able to reproduce +fix on there.

[Aurvandil]

A "Top Social Groups" widget would be very nice. I'm sure many people agree.

[Carnage]

Would you want it based on posts? Members? Members joined per time period?

[Peter Lo]

Would it be possible to display the avatar and user title of the top poster just as with the other version at https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=230794

[Carnage]

Should be able to do that; think its just a matter of editing the template and adding a call to getUserAvatarUrl or some such function.