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Adam Greenwell

The Hits List Release Notes

Version 1.6.0

Version 1.6.0 adds more control over what appears in your rankings, clearer
article-performance reports, and tools for keeping stored counts tidy. It
includes the hourly tracking, import, image fallback, and Post Views block
work prepared for 1.5.0 alongside the newer improvements.

Choose What Appears In Rankings

  • Suppress an individual post from its editor controls, or select categories
    and tags in Settings > The Hits List > Ranking Suppression. A category
    such as Sponsored Content suppresses posts assigned to that category;
    it does not disable a whole taxonomy. Child categories are included only
    when you enable that option.
  • Suppression applies to public popular/trending lists and dashboard rankings,
    including refresh candidates. Tracking, stored history, individual counts,
    and article reports remain available.
  • Exclude the article currently being viewed from a popular list.
  • Limit popular lists to posts published within a chosen number of days.
    Publication age is separate from the period used to count views.
  • Use these list controls in the block, widget, shortcodes, or template tags.

Understand And Refresh Your Content

  • Review lifetime views, daily charts, accessible daily tables, and completed
    7- or 30-day comparisons on an article's edit screen.
  • Snooze a refresh candidate for 30 days and undo the snooze when needed.
  • Record an intentional refresh and compare seven complete days before and
    after it. The refresh day is excluded, and the after-period fills as those
    days finish. Saving a normal edit does not mark an article as refreshed.
  • Trending comparisons now account for unequal window lengths. Reports label
    thin or incomplete history so missing days are not presented as zero views.
  • Choose additional roles for dashboard access. Article-report access follows
    permission to edit the article.
  • Add sortable view-count columns to Pages and selected public custom post
    types as well as Posts.

Display And Move Your Counts

  • Track recent views in hourly buckets. Short windows use retained hourly
    data; older windows fall back to daily buckets. Hourly data is kept for
    48 hours by default.
  • Add a standalone Post Views block to display one article's count.
  • Use the first image in a post's content as a thumbnail fallback when
    configured, alongside featured images and manual thumbnail URLs.
  • Import overall and daily CSV/JSON exports from The Hits List. Replace
    overwrites matching rows and is safe to repeat with the same file. Add
    adds imported values to existing counts, so repeating it adds them again.
    These files do not contain hourly history.
  • Both blocks retain compatibility with the WordPress 6.2 minimum.

Keep Stored Counts Tidy

  • Permanently deleting a post removes its overall, daily, and hourly counts
    from the correct site. Trash preserves history by default, so restoring a
    post keeps its counts. Permanent multisite site removal cleans its partition.
  • A one-time background sweep removes historical rows whose content no
    longer exists. It runs in small batches and resumes after interruptions,
    while preserving existing content of every type and status.
  • The settings screen shows cleanup status and per-table removal totals.
    On multisite, the sweep covers the shared tables across sites and its
    network report is restricted to network administrators.
  • Use wp the-hits-list delete-post-counts to remove selected posts' counts
    without deleting the articles. Preview the changes with --dry-run;
    multisite users can select a site with --blog-id.

Upgrading To 1.6.0

Back up your database and update the plugin as usual. Requirements remain
WordPress 6.2+ and PHP 7.4+, with compatibility metadata tested up to
WordPress 7.1.

Review Settings > The Hits List for ranking suppression, dashboard roles,
view-column content types, and the historical-cleanup report. The initial
cleanup is scheduled for about 15 minutes after upgrade detection and then
advances through WordPress cron. Sites that disable WordPress cron need their
usual external cron runner for it to progress.

Database errors retain progress for a retry. If rows were removed but their
progress could not be saved, the report warns that removal totals cover saved
batches only and may omit those rows.

On a single-site installation, rows labelled with a different site ID are
preserved and reported as skipped because their content cannot be checked
against that site's posts.

For setup details, see Getting Started,
Features, and the FAQ.