New Plugin

I am not actually sure what I want to call this yet, it is equal parts Noteworthy Plugin and Post/Article Karma System.

First some background.  The always industrious Michael Heilemann requested help to write a custom plugin.  I thought nothing of it, since I wasn’t really able to follow what Michael hoped to accomplish by this.

Along comes Jamie who whipped it up free of charge.  Once it was running on the Bonsai many of us could see why Michael had been jonsing for one.  In the comments of that post some thoughts were put forth, good thoughts.  That got me to thinking, I had wanted to write something like this before but could never really get excited about it.  Once I was able to see a real world example of it I got right to work.

Michael made a good point about the purpose of the plugin for his site, and I whole-heartedly agree.  I however thought a good solution would be to have both worlds, not just one or the other.  So I wrote a plugin that allows you to vote on a post, with values from 1 to 50, but also gave the site admin tools to override the voting and set values his/herself.

I think the outcome is pretty groovey, instead of one “icon” for the rating system I have two, three technically since no icon is a rating as well.

  1. 1-29 votes, no icon value.
  2. 30-49 votes, is displayed.
  3. 50 votes the peak of like-ability, gets a 

Here is a screenshot of what an admin would see when logged in:

admin for rate plugin

And here is a shot of the voting apparatus, visible only when the comment form is loaded:

click here to vote

When voting has reached 50 the vote button dissapears and all that is displayed is the rating total for that post.  I hope to be through testing by this coming Monday, December 6th.  If you are interested in this plugin leave me a comment here, I need people for the beta test!

  1. personal avatar particle
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    March 1, 2007

    I’ll be brave.

  2. personal avatar Josh
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    March 1, 2007

    I have a music review site and a blog that I could test this great plugin on, if you are still looking for beta testers.

  3. personal avatar Chris J. Davis
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    March 1, 2007

    Hey guys, thansks for all the interest. When I have everything ready to go I will be contacting you forth-with. I am hoping to get 10 admins to run this on thier sites for me to really put it through its paces.

    I can help you debug your plugin in my own site and in an internal deployment where your plugin would be very nice to vote for each other

  4. personal avatar David
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    March 1, 2007

    I would be willing to test the plugin. It looks great!!

  5. personal avatar Bruno Rodrigues
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    March 1, 2007

    I can help you debug your plugin in my own site and in an internal deployment where your plugin would be very nice to vote for each other’s moblog pictures ;)

  6. personal avatar Jeff Smith
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    March 1, 2007

    I would definitely be interested in testing for you Chris. I’m in the process of readying a new layout for my blog, and this is definitely a plugin I’d be interested in including. Drop me a line sometime.

  7. personal avatar Chris J. Davis
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    March 1, 2007

    Welcome guys,

    Wow! I never thought that someone would take my suggestion seriously. Good work. I might just switch to WP over it :-)

    Hey, good plugin ideas need to be written! I actually had fun writing it and I think it will be a nice feature for the WP community. And hey, come on over the waters fine, there are a number of people who are always willing to lend a hand in migrating, and you can always count on crazy people like me to write stuff you want!

    cool :) so when are you going to release it?

    As soon as I have some testing done, I am using this site of course and I am looking for some people who are wanting to beta test for me… know of any sucke… err I mean brave souls who would be interested?

  8. personal avatar Gabriel Mihalache
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    March 1, 2007

    Wow! I never thought that someone would take my suggestion seriously. Good work. I might just switch to WP over it :-)

  9. personal avatar Zootropo
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    March 1, 2007

    cool :) so when are you going to release it?

  10. personal avatar Zootropo
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    March 1, 2007

    my surname is brave 8-) i would like to test it too

  11. personal avatar Chris J. Davis
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    March 1, 2007

    Excellent, thanks guys I hope to have something for you to test in the next few days. I am pretty satisfied with my internal alpha testing, I haven’t found any bugs that I can see, so almost on two phase 2: beta!

    Look for something soon.

  12. personal avatar Michele
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    March 1, 2007

    I

  13. personal avatar Dylan
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    March 1, 2007

    I would be happy to help beta-test, but I wonder if there might be a way to lower or raise the number of votes it takes to rank a post. I don’t get too many interactive readers (which is why I am interested in ways to provide interaction).

  14. personal avatar Chris J. Davis
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    March 1, 2007

    Hey Everyone,

    Just a quick not to let you know I haven’t forgotten the beta test, things have just been moving a little slower than I had wanted.

    I would be happy to help beta-test, but I wonder if there might be a way to lower or raise the number of votes it takes to rank a post. I don

  15. personal avatar Dylan
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    March 1, 2007

    That sounds great. I guess, just send the word outt when the beta is ready for testing.

  16. personal avatar Chris J. Davis
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    March 1, 2007

    Will do, the last but I need to flesh out is the script to update yoru databases to add the post_rating column to your $posts table.

  17. personal avatar Anthony
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    March 1, 2007

    Hey, Chris -

    I’ve been looking for something just like this for my new site. We are a small group of professionals in the film industry who make one short film a week on our day off. We just started making the films available to the public 3 days ago, and it would be great to be able to have the audience vote on our favorites. If you’re still looking for testers, I would love to be involved.

  18. personal avatar Ian
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    March 1, 2007

    Chris,
    Just curious as to when this plugin might be available…you’ve done an awesome job on it from what I can see on the front end!

  19. personal avatar Ric
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    March 1, 2007

    We would love to use this plug in at WordPress.Com

    Please let us know when you consider it stable

  20. personal avatar Carla
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    March 1, 2007

    Say the word and I’d love to help you test it. :)

  21. personal avatar Nahnu Mahnu
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    March 1, 2007

    I’d love to help you test it, too.. i’ll be a tester!

  22. personal avatar Frank
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    March 1, 2007

    Would be happy to help test your vote pug in. I have a couple of function suggestions as well.

    cheers

    Frank

  23. personal avatar zaque
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    March 1, 2007

    I would like to get my hands on that, if you don’t mind.

  24. personal avatar Chad Alderson
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    March 1, 2007

    How is the testing progressing? I took a look at the source on wp.plugins.org, but I didn’t really see any install docs. I’m a PHP NOOB and would appreciate some insight. Can’t wait to use this plugin!

  25. personal avatar AdamStac
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    March 1, 2007

    Same here Chad, but I’d say that I’m not too much of a noob. Chris I’m not sure how to add the post_rating column to my $posts table. Can you give us a clue of what to do? There weren’t any instructions in the PHP files, so we are kinda lost on what to do at this point.

    Of course, any help is appreciated!

  26. personal avatar Mary-Ann
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    March 1, 2007

    I’d love to try it out, otherwise does anyone know of any similar plugins?

  27. personal avatar Brad
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    March 1, 2007

    I also would be very interested in testing this out for you. I’m redesigning my site and would love to incorporate this.

  28. personal avatar Anthony
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    March 1, 2007

    I hope that with the Shuttle project starting, this excellent idea for a plugin doesn’t fall by the wayside. I’ve been really looking forward to this functionality.

    To Chad and Adam - I’m having problems figuring out what to do once the files are in the appropriate places, too… either of you guys figure anything out?

  29. personal avatar dejotaru
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    March 1, 2007

    Man, I’ve been looking for a plug in like this for ages.. when will it be released?

  30. personal avatar Bret
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    March 1, 2007

    Would love your plugin please email it to me.
    Thanks,
    Bret

  31. personal avatar Ihad
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    March 1, 2007

    Gah! I stumble across this post via google and it seems Michael as abandoned that plugin on his site and Jamie never released his version and there’s none here and I wasn’t looking for that kind of plugin in the first place, just a simple 1 to 10 scale rating for movies, books, etc. I shall google some more!
    Interesting concept though the noteworthy thing :)=

  32. personal avatar Farooq
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    March 1, 2007

    Hi Chris,

    I am having some trouble implementing the plugin. I have gotten it to display the icons and everything, and also the admin controls. I haven’t been able to get it to display the “Vote for this article” button. How can I implement that, I’ve tried calling the current_rating($post->id) within the document but only the box shows up and when it is clicked it doesn’t do anything. Let me know if you can help. Thanks!

  33. personal avatar Martijn
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    March 1, 2007

    Hi Chris,

    Great idea but I have the same problem as the previous poster: I get the star/heart by using the admin rating but cannot get it to display the user voting option.

    Any tips?
    Martijn

  34. personal avatar Martijn Stegink
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    March 1, 2007

    Hi there,

    Not te be pushy but just to know: is it still planned to be finished some time or can I do something to help make that happen? I really would like to use it.

    Or did you just abandon it? (which is fine too since it is your project).

    Regards,
    Martijn

  35. personal avatar Rae
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    March 1, 2007

    Nice plugin, but I guess I’m missing examples?

  36. personal avatar Ivan
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    March 1, 2007

    So, is there any way to download and test the plugin?

  37. personal avatar Josef Davies-Coates
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    March 1, 2007

    This sounds like a great plugin.

    What I really want though is a rating scale of -2 to +2 (from strong disagreement to strong approval)

    I just don’t get why people making rating/voting tools never include negative scores!

    Maybe one day I’ll learn to code something myself…

  38. personal avatar Jude
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    March 1, 2007

    What I want to do on my blog, is every few hours take the oldest post and move it to the
    front of the queue, all automatically. Anyone know if there is a plugin that can do this or
    a simple way to set up another plugin to do this (use my own feed perhaps)?
    Thanks.

Pingbacks & Trackbacks

  1. Noteworthy Functionality at Binary Bonsai » [...] Related: Chris has a voting system plugin // Used for showing and hiding user information in the comment form function ShowUtils() { document.getElementById("commentblock").style.display = ""; document.getElementById("commentblockhidden").style.display = "none"; } function HideUtils() { document.getElementById("commentblock").style.display = "none"; document.getElementById("commentblockhidden").style.display = ""; } [...]

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