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Heads up: the combined plugin in underway, and will actually be a very powerful plugin where users can vote/rate/like ANYTHING in wordpress and buddypress. I’m developing this for another client, who is paying for the core functionality to vote on images, and they don’t need all the fancy stuff that usually comes in a plugin, such as nice admin options, translation, hooks, filters, etc. They also don’t need to vote groups, forum posts, blog posts, custom post types, blog comments, activity items, etc. With donations I’m also going to write scripts to convert old plugin data to the new plugin, same with group reviews plugin.
If people in the community would like these things, then please make a donation so i can do the extra work and release it properly to the community as an excellent, flexible, extensible, strong plugin. If not donations come it, it will just be for rating images using BP Albums. Even small donations count, so don’t be shy. Paypal donations to deryk@bluemandala.com. I will include all donors in the plugin read me, so please mention any website you’d like me to link to.
To be clear, this plugin is happening 100%, it is already being built. All donations go to the things the community needs that the client does not, as mentioned above. So don’t worry about making a donation and it not being released.
And as a perk, I’ll email early versions to anyone who makes a donation. (if any of this is getting unethical from an open source standpoint, please let me know!)
@imjscn it won’t be a beast, it will be … poetry
and in case anyone else is reading this thread in the future regarding the in-depth discussion about using db tables or not, I wanted to mention one thing I learned.
You can insert or update the wordpress database – existing tables or your own – using nice built in class functions. for example:
`
$wpdb->mytable = $wpdb->base_prefix . ‘mytable’;
$values = array(
‘col1′ => $myval1,
‘col2′ => $myval2,
);
$wpdb->insert($wpdb->mytable, $values);
`
doing things this way, you gain all the security features of the wordpress database class, and don’t have to work about preparing or escaping the query. it’s done for you. $wpdb->update also exists. more here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wpdb_ClassI think the plugin will be called Rate Vote Like Anything. And I’m building it with those three systems in mind:
Rate: you can rate things 1 to 5 (or whatever scale)
Vote: you can vote thumbs up or down (1 or -1)
Like: you can like somethingSo it probably will work to replace other voting systems. I’m going to take your advice and do my best to include an API so that others can use the plugin for any type of content. I’m going to replace my other BuddyPress Rate Forum Posts plugin. Tens of twenties of people (!) have asked me to extend my other plugin to rate blog posts and comments, so this new system will do it.
And as far as group rating is concerned, I’ve already built the star rating aspect for another site. you can see it in action here http://www.fashionsalade.com/2011/02/street-people/my-icons/rebeca/ (you need to login via facebook first).
The major benefit of this new plugin is that it will have shared ‘karma’ from all the items you create. Some people will want this, others might not. But it’s a cool feature that I really like. Site admins can also decide which items will be karmable (i think i just made a word up).
I’m also not making it BP dependant, Although I’m guessing it will mainly be used on BP sites, as wordpress already has things like GD post ratings – but that plugin is a beast.
After suffering most of yesterday while stretching custom post types to do my bidding, I’ve decided to create new tables today. and now i’m at peace
However it was a great exercise to do, and I got to dig into wordpress core much more than I normally do, which is always fruitful. Thanks so much for your encouragement.
