January 20, 2009

For some time now I have been talking about adaptive themes. I wrote about this not too long ago in a post about setting your theme into modes to anticipate the users needs. Now I have started on another experiment to try and bring things a little closer.

Today I installed a new plugin which aims to modify the contents of the home page based on previous visitors. In simple terms the plugin takes a number of posts (more than the home page shows by default) and checks to see how many clicks it has gotten from the front page. It takes this value, modifies it based on the age of the post, and then selects a weighted random post from that list.

Now, this is a very basic plugin and to assign the title ‘intelligent’ to it is far from accurate, but my aim is to see how the home page evolves over time and to modify the plugin accordingly. Ideally, I would like it to be much more detailed, gathering data about the referrer for example and, where it is a search engine, trying to divide the users and therefore the weight of each post, by the keywords used. That however is some way off.

The aim of all of this is to find new ways of letting a website adapt to the visitor. One very practical applicable of this kind of idea would be to select types of advertising, if any, and types of post according to the referrer and their likelihood of clicking through.

If you want a copy of plugin I am using you can download it in txt format. Depending on your theme it may be easy or hard to install, but with the default theme entering the following on the index.php page, about the if (have_posts()) line will do the trick:

[php]
//replace posts with our posts of choice
//only do it if on page 1 thought
if ($paged < 2){
$posts = $fun_with_evo_posts->return_posts();
}
?>


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