If you upgraded WordPress to 2.5 and above, you will most likely encounter the Fatal Error problem when trying to activate the Popularity Contest Plugin by Alexa King even if you downloaded the latest version (currently 1.3b3).

Here is the fix for the fatal error:

1. Open popularity-contest.php
2. Scroll down to line 59.
3. Find require(’../../wp-blog-header.php’);
4. Replace with require(’../wp-blog-header.php’);

If you activated it and it displayed the wp_ak_popularity does not exists error, go to your MyPHPAdmin in your control panel for your server, run the following SQL queries:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `wp_ak_popularity` (
`post_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`total` int(11) NOT NULL,
`feed_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`home_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`archive_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`category_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`single_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`comments` int(11) NOT NULL,
`pingbacks` int(11) NOT NULL,
`trackbacks` int(11) NOT NULL,
`last_modified` datetime,
KEY `post_id` (`post_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `wp_ak_popularity_options` (
`option_name` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
`option_value` varchar(50) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

Verify the 2 tables exist and try to activate the plugin again. It should work now.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Richard Palace Dot Com is now updated with WordPress 2.51

Not much of a problem except the Popularity Contest Plugin (currently 1.3b3) by Alex King which is quite challenging. I will talk about it in my next post.

Decided to try out the 2 new templates (StudioPress, LightBreaker) and also installed WordPress Mobile Plugin which is mainly used by mobile user.

Popularity: 4% [?]