Last time I posted about the wp-reactions plugin, I said that I planned on having a new version released by the end of the year.

The good news is that I’ve made considerable progress over the last six weeks overhauling the back-end to make it easier to maintain and expand. I’ve also learned a lot more about relational databases in the process, which is good for me if not the plugin users.

The bad news is that this process isn’t finished yet, so it’ll be a little while longer before there is a new version available. I hope that anyone out there who is waiting for a new release isn’t too disappointed.

I’m sad to admit that I’ve somewhat neglected my wp-reactions Wordpress Plugin over the last few months. All the usual reasons apply: Work, real life, laziness.

It seems though that there is still interest in the plugin, so over the next few weeks I’m going to give it an overhaul. It’s been a long time coming, and since I first wrote the original code I’ve learned a lot about the ‘correct’ way to program web apps.

The current code is not very flexible: In order to implement the new features that are in the roadmap, I’m going to have to start again from scratch. This time I’m going to give the plugin a proper DB back-end, so that reaction text can be updated without resetting the count, and so that posts in different categories can have different reaction options (and a lot of other things, too!). This should also make it a lot easier to maintain and add further features to.

So, if you use wp-reactions, or are holding off until some of the features you want are available, rejoice! I expect to have a new version available by the end of the year.

I have already had some feedback on wp-reactions, which is great! The plugin was downloaded more than 50 times in the first 12 hours of being online, which I’m really pleased about. What I want to do is share with you guys the direction I will be taking the plugin in. I will link to this post from the plugin page and keep it up to date as new releases come out.

Current Features (version 0.6.6)

Features that are working in the current version:

• Add reactions to new posts. 100% complete
• Manage reaction descriptions for future posts. 100% complete
• Ability to apply reaction updates to all existing posts (not just new ones). 100% complete
• Add CSS classes to the generated markup to allow authors to style the form as they see fit. 100% complete
• Include an option to add ‘question’ text before the reaction form. 100% complete

Upcoming Features

Features that I am currently working on:

• Have different sets of reactions for posts in different categories. 0% complete
• Add a cookie/IP based filter to prevent users from posting the same reaction multiple times. 0% complete

Future Features

These are features that I want to include in the plugin at some point, but do not have a concrete plan for yet:

• Stats Tracking. 0% complete
• Give authors the option of making the reactions mutually exclusive (i.e. Users can only check one reaction per post). 0% complete
• Internationalize plugin. 0% complete
  

Well, here it is. I’ve finally come to a point where I’m happy to release my WordPress plugin to the public. I plumped on wp-reactions for the name and 0.5 for the version number. I have a number of extra features I want to get in before version 1.0.

It is by no means complete, but the functionality that is there works 100%. At least it does now. There was a bit of a panic when it first went up because I was stupid and left out some important test cases. Oops! Oh well, live and learn. The most current version (which should work) is 0.5.2. Download wp-reactions here. With any luck you should be able to see it in action on this very post!

The Wordpress ‘reactions’ plugin that I’m working on is coming along well. In fact, I actually have a demo! Take a peek at my testing blog to see it in action. You can check any of the boxes next to the reaction text (cool, interesting and boring) and see the number of ratings updated.

The plugin itself is still not ready for public release. If you look at the demo, you’ll see that you can un-check a box after checking it and the counter will still go up. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff that needs changing too:

• The reaction text is hard coded. I need to write an admin page that allows the user to specify the reactions they want to display and some extra php to actually display the correct text on the page.
• As mentioned above, the UI needs some work. Specifically, the check boxes need to be grayed-out after being clicked to to prevent users spamming the system.
• It would be nice to have some sort of check performed to see whether a given user has already rated a post and correctly display this information on return visits.
• I would eventually like to have an admin tracking page that can be used to display the highest ranked posts for each response. I would also like to implement a widget that can be used to display this information to visitors if desired.

The last two points probably won’t make it into the first public release, as they aren’t essential to the functionality of the feature. The first two are essential though, and hopefully I’ll get a chance to work on them sometime this week.