Excellent. Not only did I just discover the appropriate tools to make the Popularity Contest plugin to play nice with the WP-Cache plugin, but I’ve found the necessary widget to allow it to work in the ACP‘s sidebar as well.
Now I’m happy 🙂
The only very minor snag was that the popularity contest widget had only the default values for the akpc_most_popular function (that is, 10 list items) where I only needed five and even though there was a title field, there was a secondary title, hard-coded in the plugin. However both were quite easy to fix by editing the widget code.
Maybe in the future I’ll try to code the widget to accept arguments for number of list items displayed and/or category but seeing as my php knowledge is non-existant that might take a while…
However you can use just one Popularity contest Plugin with the widged inside of it. W-Popularity wraps Popularity Contest and provides Most popular widget for the sidebar. Also adds some improvements.