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Display the most popular post on Laravel

Learn how to display the most popular post on your Laravel application and make it more prominent among your contents

2 years ago

7 mins read

3336 views

In this post, you'll be learning how to display popular posts or other content such as "article", "videos" and "images" by querying the model which has the highest number of views.

What makes it special is that you can define the logic to divide it into multiple types such as "popular content for the past few days, weeks, months and even year". Aside from that, you can also retrieve the popular post by total views or unique views which will be very powerful depending on the use case.

Prerequisite


In order for you to continue this tutorial you have to read my other post on "How to implement visitor views/visitor counter in Laravel application". In that post, I have discussed how to anonymously count your visitor visit on your page and display the stats to the public.

Once you have read and implemented it, let's move on to getting the most popular content on your website.

Implementation


There are several implementations for this and it's described below.

Get the total views for the past few days

To get the most popular post, the Laravel Eloquent Viewable package has provided the `orderByViews` method where you can pass in the order which is ascending or descending as well as the period of the post in the past days.
/* total views for the last 1 day */
Post::orderByViews('desc', Period::pastDays(1))
    ->take(10)
    ->get();

/* total views for the last 3 days */
Post::orderByViews('desc', Period::pastDays(3))
    ->take(10)
    ->get();

/* total views for the last 7 days */
Post::orderByViews('desc', Period::pastDays(7))
    ->take(10)
    ->get();
To get the unique views call the `orderByUniqueViews` method and pass in the condition of whether it's `ascending` or `descending` and the period as follows.
Post::orderByUniqueViews('asc', Period::pastDays(3))
    ->get();  /* descending */

Post::orderByUniqueViews('desc', Period::pastDays(3))
    ->get(); /* ascending */

Get the total views since specified time


If you prefer to get the total views since the specified time, you can define using the code like below.
Period::subSeconds(int $seconds);
Period::subMinutes(int $minutes);
Period::subHours(int $hours);
Period::subDays(int $days);
Period::subWeeks(int $weeks);
Period::subMonths(int $months);
Period::subYears(int $years);
Below is an example of how to use it.
$postSince2MonthAgo = Period::subMonths(2);

/* post since 2 months ago */
Post::orderByViews('desc', $postSince2MonthAgo)
    ->take(10)
    ->get();

Get the total views for between 2 dates


On the other hand, to get the views for between 2 periods you will have to define the "starting" and "ending" of the date. You can use the normal date written in string `2020-06-06` otherwise user carbon instance `Carbon::createFromDate(2020, 05, 05)`
$startDateTime = Carbon::createFromDate(2020, 05, 05); /* carbon instance */
$endDateTime = '2020-06-06';

$mayToJune = Period::create($startDateTime, $endDateTime);

views($post)
    ->period($mayToJune)
    ->count();
For a longer duration such as between the year 2020 and 2021, you can directly set the period to the year itself.
$from2020to2021 = Period::create('2020', '2021');

views($post)
    ->period($from2020to2021)
    ->count();

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