I have a lot of video posts on my site and I’m looking to show the user a list of posts they’ve recently viewed. I’m guessing the best route is to just add the post id to an array in their usermeta when they visit a post but I’m wondering how can I do that and still be able to show them a chronological order of posts in which they viewed them. And also I wanna clip the number of posts in the array keeping it at 20 posts or so that the array isn’t out of control. Any ideas?
1 Answer
This plugin may fulfill your requirements.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/recently-viewed-posts
Usage
get_recently_viewed_posts( $max_shown = 10 )
returns a string of li’s.
recently_viewed_posts( $max_shown = 10 )
prints a div
If you are interested in learning how to develop this functionality yourself, download the plugin and see the source files. WordPress is Open Source!
Update:
The above plugin did not work. The following approach will help to
get the recently viewed video ids.
<?php
/*
* Plugin Name: WPSE_63266_Recently_Viewed
*/
function wpse_63266_update_recently_viewed(){
/**
* If is admin or isn't single, then return.
* To get only singular video posts use; if(!is_singular('videos')) return;
*/
if(is_admin() || !is_single()) return;
global $post;
// Get the current post id.
$current_post_id = get_the_ID();
if(is_user_logged_in()){
// Store recently viewed post ids in user meta.
$recenty_viewed = get_user_meta(get_current_user_id(), 'recently_viewed', true);
if( '' == $recenty_viewed ){
$recenty_viewed = array();
}
// Prepend id to the beginning of recently viewed id array.(http://php.net/manual/en/function.array-unshift.php)
array_unshift($recenty_viewed, $current_post_id);
// Keep the recently viewed items at 5. (http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.array-slice.php)
$recenty_viewed = array_slice($recenty_viewed, 0, 5); // Extract a slice of the array
// Update the user meta with new value.
update_user_meta(get_current_user_id(), 'recently_viewed', $recenty_viewed);
} else {
/**
* For non-logged in users you can use the same procedure as above
* using get_option() and update_option()
*/
}
}
add_action('wp_footer', 'wpse_63266_update_recently_viewed');
function wpse_63266_show_recently_viewed(){
$recenty_viewed = get_user_meta(get_current_user_id(), 'recently_viewed', true);
echo '<pre>'; print_r($recenty_viewed); echo '</pre>';
}
add_action('wpse_63266_recently_viewed', 'wpse_63266_show_recently_viewed');
?>
do action()
in your template to see the change of array values (video ids) while you are browsing through the posts.
do_action('wpse_63266_recently_viewed');