Question

Is there a tried and true best practice for displaying most viewed posts?
Do people normally set up a viewed table and count records? I believe this would require a join of the posts and viewed table when retrieving data. Is there a better way? Thanks.

Answer 1

Perhaps create a views table with a unique id, post id, and IP address/unique identifier. That way you can sort by all views/unique views.

You order by would be

SELECT [...], COUNT(DISTINCT(views.ip)) count
FROM posts
INNER JOIN views ON views.postid = post.id
ORDER BY count DESC
GROUP BY post.id