Wordpress is the most popular blogging platform out there. One of the things that made Wordpress so popular is the availability of hundreds of cool plugins and themes(most of them free!).

But plugins come with a price. Since plugins are developed by third parties, not all are very reliable. A single bad behaving plugin can bring down your entire blog! So install only necessary and useful plugins on your Wordpress installation.

I have a very limited set of plugins installed on this blog. To me, one of the most important plugin is the Related Posts plugin. Whenever you write a blog entry, this plugin automatically finds related previous posts which you can display anywhere. In my blog, you will find related entries on the right side.

Installing related post plugin is simple,

1. Download Related Posts plugin from here. If the site is down (500 error on his Wordpress installation!), direct download is here.




2. Upload the plugin file (related-posts.php) to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory and activate it.




3. Once you have activated it, a new option “Related Posts Option” will appear under plugins tab. In that you need to click on “run this script” link at the bottom. This modifies Wordpress table wp_posts to enable FULLTEXT indexes.

This should setup the Related posts plugin. But on certain Web hosting platforms I have found that “run this script” fails. This is because of the MySQL engine settings.

Following is the error I got on Globat host (on dreamhost it works fine),

#1214 - The used table type doesn’t support FULLTEXT indexes

This means that wp_posts table is NOT using MYISAM engine which is needed for FULTEXT indexes. To solve this problem run the following SQL on your PhpMyAdmin SQL console.

ALTER TABLE wp_posts ENGINE = MYISAM;

And then you can run the following SQL to configure FULLTEXT indexes.

ALTER TABLE `wp_posts` ADD FULLTEXT `post_related` (
`post_name` ,
`post_content`
)

Now you are all set. To display Related entries you can put <?php related_posts(); ?> . You can also control how the related entries should appear on your blog (For more details see Related entries readme file).

If you still face any issues, feel free to write to me.