With the increased focus on the search in SharePoint 2013, it’s only natural that Microsoft has added a wealth of new features and Web Parts to help amp up how information is found on SharePoint. One of these new search features is the Popular Items Web Part. This Web Part allows you to search for and display popular items on your SharePoint site. One of the nicest features of this Web Part is that it is highly customizable, allowing you to change your search criteria, adjust how results are displayed, and more. In this post, we’ll introduce you to the Popular Items Web Part, including how to add it to your site, as well as how to adjust your settings.

Adding the Popular Items Web Part to your Site:

1. Log into SharePoint 2013 and click the Page tab from the Ribbon. From here, select Edit Page:

2. On the Edit page, select the Insert Web Part tab from the Ribbon. From the Categories menu, select Search-Driven Content, and then Popular Items from the Parts menu:

3. Click on the Add button at the bottom of the page to install the Web Part.

4. Once the Web Part has been successfully installed on your page, you’ll see the following:

Navigating the Popular Items Web Part Tool Pane:

You will notice that the tool pane of the Popular Items Web Part has a number of different properties, the settings of which you may adjust, including:

• Search Criteria
• Display Templates
• Property Mappings
• Settings

1. Search Criteria:

In the Search Criteria settings, you have the ability to build a query in order to customize your search results:

To begin, click the Change query button.

On the Build Your Query dialog page, you will see a number of different tabs, including BASICS, REFINERS, SETTINGS, and TEST. Each tab contains different criteria which can be adjusted to define your query. To the right side of the selection options, you will see a SEARCH RESULT PREVIEW which displays the results of your query.

Once you are happy with the query which you have defined, click OK

Next, you will be asked to input the Number of items to show. This option will set the number of relevant results which will be displayed on the Popular Items Web Part.

2. Display Templates:

In the Display Templates menu, you have the ability to change how your Popular Items will be displayed for the user:

• Control: Allows you to adjust how users will navigate through your items:
• Item: Allows you to adjust how a specific item is displayed in the Popular Items Web Part:

3. Property Mappings:

In the Property Mappings menu, you have the ability to change the mapping of managed properties.  You have the ability to change the following: Picture URL, Link URL, Line 1, Line 2, and Line 3. 

To change the mapping of a given property, simply check the checkbox and adjust the different properties in the drop-downs as needed:

4. Settings:

Under the Property Mappings menu, you have the ability to adjust different variables related to your Popular Items. This includes setting what provides the query results, as well as the ability to set an Alternate Error Message.

Displaying Search Results in the Popular Items Web Part:

To initiate a search, you will first need to go into the tool pane, as described above, and set all of your properties and search criteria. In this example, we’ll be using the following options:

Once finished, click Apply and OK.  The Popular Items Web Part will display the results of your search. For this search, our results are being presented in a List format with the items displayed as Picture on top, and 3 lines on the bottom:

One of the nice features of this Web Part is the ability to adjust the display settings as desired. In the following example, we have resent the same search as above to display with the following options: Control = Slideshow and Item = Video:

For more information check out our online documentation or check out our site for a list of products!

azeesdinu wrote re How to Use the Popular Items Web Part in SharePoint 2013
on Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 2:17 AM

Do we need to activate any feature to get this Search-Driven Content Webparts,