[wp-hackers] 'Scoring system' to show more relevant posts?

[Alex Hempton-Smith]

Hi all,

Putting this out there to see whether others have worked on something
similar, and any tips you might have.

I'm working on a news website, online newspaper type thing, that I'd like to
make more relevant for users. The homepage will be just like a newspaper
frontpage, but dynamically generated based on what is popular and relevant
to the user (if logged in).

I thought I could basically work out a scoring system, that gives each post
a 'score' based on different criteria:

Popularity (how many views and/or stars)
Timestamp (latest posts have a higher score)
Interests (I'll have an array of the users interests and if the posts
tags/cats match one or more, it gets a higher score)
Location (the logged in user will provide a postcode, if the post is in
their region it gets bumped)

etc etc.

My only issue is making this happen on the homepage, do I just 'foreach'
through the latest posts and then generate the homepage based on that? Thats
resource intensive though...

What are your thoughts on making homepages more relevant to users? If I can
package this up, I'll release it as a plugin later on.

-- Alex  (Hempsworth)