The tag we need is called “wp_list_categories()” and by default it lists all your categories in alphabetical order. All we need to do is add some arguments to it to modify the default values and we’re done! We need to limit the number of items shown to five, we also want to show the post counts in the categories and we want to order the list by the post count, in descending order.

The “number” argument actually has no default value. The reason for this is that it limits the SQL query directly, so there is no need for it by default. We can add it though to impose a limit, so our first argument will be “number=5″. We also want to show the post counts, so we use “show_count=1″ to enable this (show_count=0 is the default).

We also want to order the list by the post count, so we use “orderby=count” to achieve this. By default lists are sorted ascending, meaning that the lowest post count would show up first. To make the list descending, we can use “order=DESC”.

I also use one last argument in there, which is “title_li=”. This sets the title of the list to be nothing, by default the list is presented with a title. I like to hard code my titles for a few reasons, but feel free to change this as you like. So here is the complete code I used, one simple line to do a seemingly hard task, enjoy

<?php wp_list_categories(’number=5&show_count=1&orderby=count&order=DESC&title_li=’) ?>

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