Favorites and Recommended Posts
The Movable Type Community Solution comes with the ability for administrators to allow their readers to vote for, recommend and favorite posts. These capabilities are powered by the Movable Type Ratings Framework, which allows for any data stored within Movable Type to be scored or ranked in some way. However the Community Solution surfaces this framework as a user-facing set of features which allows designers to:
- aggregate and display a list of favorites associated with a user on their profile
- embed the functionality for readers to click a button to vote for a post
- display the number of people who have voted for a post
- display a list of entries sorted by popularity (the number of votes associated with a post)
In addition the Community Solution allows:
- the system to throttle incoming votes from anonymous users by IP address to help prevent click fraud
- administrators to define the access policy for voting (e.g. anonymous readers can/cannot vote for posts)
- administrators to view a list of a site’s most popular posts directly from their dashboard
Setting Up Voting
Blogs creating using either the “Community Forum” or “Community Blog” template set will have all of the necessary tags embedded directly into their site’s templates to enable voting on all blog posts and forum topics.
However, if you wish to upgrade an existing blog or web site to “turn on” voting, then some template editing may be required to insert the proper tags in the places you have in mind.
See also Voting Template Tags.
Voting Template Tags
Sorting posts by number of votes
When using the default Community Blog or Community Forum templates, this code snippet will list the entries with the highest number of votes/recommendations.
<mt:Entries sort_by="score" namespace="community_pack_recommend">
<li><mt:EntryScore namespace="community_pack_recommend"><$mt:EntryTitle$>
</mt:Entries>
Note the “score” value in the “sort_by” argument, and the “namespace” argument. The votes recorded by EntryRecommendVoteLink are automatically recorded in the “community_pack_recommend” namespace.
