On NETTUTS.com today there's a new tutorial for the WordPress users/developers out there showing you how to create a "Most Popular By Views" plugin for your site.

As you continue writing for WordPress more and more, the level of difficulty and complexity of your plugins will eventually reach far beyond the simple back-end data manipulation, as demonstrated in our beginner’s article. In this installment we’ll cover in-depth: database interaction, Admin Widgets, and Sidebar Widgets. Today’s example will be a custom built “Most Popular by Views” plugin, which creates an admin area widget for us to view, and a sidebar widget for visitors to see.

Besides waling through the whole process, the tutorial offers a download of the source if you want to get started right away. The resulting plugin can be used on both the admin and public sides of the site as a widget that can be dropped in easily. Code to create both the widget and the database table it needs for a backend are included.