I believe this is now done. It was based on number of views, but now it's based on the average rating in the five star review. Let me know if it doesn't seem right though (i.e. stuff that has lots of good ratings isn't appearing). Assuming my programming is correct and moving to resolved. ;)

I'd actually prefer to show both: Most Highly Rated, and Most Popular -- where popularity is based on # of views. This will allow for new, highly rated patterns to rise to visibility immediately, and it will also allow for the test of time to make the most viewed patterns remain visible and not get buried. The most viewed aren't always the most highly rated, and vice versa. That's why I kept referring to two different things -- I'm sorry I wasn't more explicit about that!

No problem. ... you only had one "popular" in the original sketch... just let me know how you want to distinguish them so that the distinction makes sense on the index page...

PS I personally think that "most viewed" is a bit silly because it just perpetuates the top items. i.e. the thing that is the most viewed gets more views because it's being highlighted as having been viewed a lot. That's just me though. :)

Yeah, I know... I'm inclined to use it, though, since there's over 3 years' worth of content up there, and using "most viewed" will guarantee that older content remains visible during the shocking change of the site -- I want to do whatever we can to make it so people know the Cme they've known and loved for a long time is still here. We can always nix this metric in a few months.

So, let's call them, "Most Highly Rated" and "Most Popular". If we can use subheads (or even just a line of plain text), the subheads would be "Based on 5-star votes" and "Based on number of views", respectively. 

Um: the number of times a page was viewed was NOT imported from the old site... I guess that means you want it imported?

Oh! Heh.

Know what, I might have even stopped it from being tracked on the old site in the interest of keeping server load at bay.

It's okay if we start from scratch here. The old patterns and articles are linked in so many places, that will still set them apart from new content, even starting from scratch.