Making a Whats Hot Section in TwentyTen (Wordpress)

Question

Ok so, TwentyTen is a great new theme, fine.

However, I wish to add more functionality to it and make it like a theme having a magazine style front page (similar to Hybrid News) with mainly a "Whats Hot" Featured Section where I can pick up posts dynamically having the most activity on them (like checking the number of facebook likes or twitter shares or comments etc.) I need this feature as the number of authors on my site will increase and I would need this kind of a selection mechanism to mark out the trending posts.

From what I figured out till now, I would have to add some php to my theme, and do a bit of CSS.

But, How do I go about it? Because the codex is confusing me on this one.

Answer 1

@Pekka is correct. This does require a little more ingenuity than some PHP. Try this plugin out. It's built for 2.9.2, but does work with 3.0 just fine. I'm sure the author will update it eventually since it's a popular one.