Pin Button Sidebar lives on as the popular posts in Shard
October 2013. Pin Button Sidebar showed the featured images of your most popular posts in a sidebar that slid into view, each with a Pinterest button and a pin counter, and you could set a different sidebar for every page.
It depended on the pin counts, and when Pinterest stopped handing those out the social proof part stopped working. The animation also got old quickly. We did not try to revive it. Instead the useful half, a popular posts list, went into Shard 2.0, the single sharing plugin we built in November 2026, and that is the file on this page.
Shard counts views per post with a small counter, anonymous visitors on single posts only, no cookies and no personal data. That count feeds a Popular posts widget for classic sidebars, a block for the block editor and a [shard_popular] shortcode, with thumbnails, for all time or the last N days. Until views have been counted it lists the most commented posts instead, so a fresh install is never empty. One admission: the classic widget is the piece we have only checked by reading the code, because our test site was a block theme with no sidebars; the block and shortcode share its rendering code and were tested.
No animated sidebar, no pin counts. The Pinterest hover button from Pin Button Attraction is in the same plugin, on the images inside your posts.
