SSWI — When in doubt, buff it out.

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:

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

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!

If you post about this on Twitter, please use the hashtag #silly346.