Top posters widget type

What does this do?
This mod provides a Top Posters widget type which can be configured to show the members who made the most posts over a period of time.

Features

Provides widget type Top Posters.
Displays a list of the top posters on your forum inside a widget.
Allows multiple instances of the widget.
Easy installation via products system.
Configuration options:

Usergroups to include
Eight different time periods to choose from
Number of posters to display.
Displays avatar of 'top poster'

Potential features

Exclude forum(s) from counting
Exclude forum(s) with no post count
Top all time posters (eg based on post count)
Top bloggers widget
Top article posters widget
Top social groups widget
Top posted in forums widget
Top posted in threads widget
Top commented on album/blog/articles widget

Installation
1. Upload the contents of the upload folder to your site.
2. Import product file.
3. Clear CMS cache. (failing to do this may mean the widget doesn't show up in the create new widget box)

Usage
1. Go into the widget manager and select Create new widget.
2. Select the top posters widget type from the drop down list.
3. Fill out the remaining form items and hit save.
4. Configure the widget from the widget manager.
5. Add the widget to a layout.

What is an Alpha release?
This modification has been released as an Alpha release. This means that it has only been tested within a limited number of environments, eg My development board and boards of a small number of other users. As far as I'm aware, all releases are bug free at the time of release, but due to the limited number of users not all the bugs may have been found yet.

As with all mods, make a full backup of your database before installing and ideally, test on a development board which matches the setup of your live board as closely as possible first. Please report any issues you have and any solutions you find, to help improve this product.

Changelog

4.0-0.1 a2

Fixed issue with configuring widget on vb 4.1
Added avatar of top poster to widget.
4.0-0.1 a1

Initial release

Notes

I created this widget because the existing ones that do similar things had performance issues and the mod author was unwilling/slow to implement the fix I sent them. This behaives much more reasonably, even in the worst case (top posters this year) It takes a little over a second when run against my 1.2 million posts board. Considering that this result is cached for a day, the performance implications of this widget are minimal.
Caching behaivour can only be changed by editing the code; currently the last* time periods cache the result to the end of the time period (eg if you are using last month, the cache is set to expire about 1 minuite after the start of the next month) For this year and this month, the cache is set to expire after a day, this week is set to expire after 6 hours and today is set to expire hourly. A future version may allow customisation over these timings.
The Planned features are a set of ideas that I could do using the current code fairly easilly; however most are not required for my own use, if there are sufficient people interested in a feature to make it worth my while coding it, I will do.
This is an example of how to write a widget properly and I used the direct php execution widget as a model of how to implement it. Please feel free to use this code as an example when creating your own widgets types.