mySQL query - show most popular item

Question

I need to find the most popular occurrence of an item grouped by date and display the total of all items along with the name of this item. Is something like this possible in a s

Answer 1

thanks to hohodave for his initial response:

SELECT date, item, cnt, (
SELECT COUNT( * )
FROM test_popularity
WHERE date = t.date
) AS totalCnt
FROM (
SELECT date, item, count( item_id ) AS cnt
FROM test_popularity
GROUP BY date, item_id
ORDER BY cnt DESC
)t
GROUP BY date;