This plugin adds voting functionality for posts. This function is similar to Reddit or Digg, in that visitors can vote for and against.

Guests can also vote for posts. This functionality can be disabled as well.

A widget can be displayed showing the most voted posts on your blog, giving further exposure to your popular posts.

Features

A brief summary of what the plugin has to offer:

• Visitors can vote for your posts, if they are allowed to
• Easy management of post votes
• Two-way voting: People can vote for or against your posts if feature is enabled
• Post authors can be barred from voting their own posts
• Initial vote count feature enables the voting of posts the moment they were published
• Fairly customizable features
• Top voted post widget gives greater exposure of posts your readers like

Requirements

1. Wordpress 1.5+

2. WordPress theme must contain a call to the get_header() function

3. WordPress theme must contain the Wordpress loop

Installation

1. Upload the "voteitup" folder into the "/wp-content/plugins/" directory.

2. Login to your Wordpress Administration Panel

3. Activate the "Vote It Up" plug-in from the plugins page in the Wordpress dashboard. If there are no error messages, the plugin is properly installed.

4. You can choose which of the following themes you want to represent the votes as via the VoteItUp options page. You will need to insert the relevant code (<?php DisplayVotes(get_the_ID()); ?>) into the WordPress loop.

5. You can customize the plugin options via the Wordpress Dashboard (Options > Vote It Up in Wordpress versions prior to 2.3, Settings > Vote It Up in Wordpress versions after 2.5).

6. You can install the Most Voted widget by adding the following PHP code <?php MostVotedAllTime(); ?>. Installing this widget is not required for Vote It Up to function. If your template supports sidebar widgets, you can install it as a widget in your sidebar.

7. Editing votes can be done via the Wordpress Dashboard (Options > Edit Votes in Wordpress versions prior to 2.3, Settings > Edit Votes in Wordpress versions after 2.5).

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What are the currently available themes for this plugin?

The following themes are currently bundled with the latest version of the plugin:

• Bar (default)
• Ticker
• Text
• Orange Ticker

Theme support was added on version 1.0.7.

This plugin doesn't seem installed properly

If the plugin cannot write to the database, you can try manually executing the below SQL queries (you can use phpMyAdmin to do this):

CREATE TABLE `wp_votes` (
      ID int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
      post int(11) NOT NULL,
      votes text NOT NULL,
      guests text NOT NULL,
      usersinks text NOT NULL,
      guestsinks text NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`ID`)
);
 
CREATE TABLE `wp_votes_users` (
      ID int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
      user int(11) NOT NULL,
      votes text NOT NULL,
      sinks text NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`ID`)
);

For other problems, you may want to ensure that there are no missing files, and that you have followed instructions in this Read Me file

Is there any limit to the number of votes?

There is no limit as to how many votes for each post can take. The vote count can also go into the negatives as well.

I have a very popular site, will VoteItUp be able to handle it?

Vote It Up is able to handle hundreds of votes a day, without causing any server strain at all. The technical limit is about 8000 votes if all are made from guests, however that limit can be overcomed by doing a minor adjustment to the database your blog runs in.

Running the following query will remove the technical limit. Note that this will take up more space on your hosting. (Note, the following SQL query assumes your database prefix is wp_, which is default for Wordpress).

ALTER TABLE `wp_votes` CHANGE `guestsinks` `guestsinks` LONGTEXT CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci NOT NULL 
ALTER TABLE `wp_votes` CHANGE `guests` `guests` LONGTEXT CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci NOT NULL