UpVote – Social Bookmarking WordPress Theme

A vote is worth as much as your ability to see who cast it

You open a link aggregator for your sector. The first weeks go well. One day, someone submits an article from their own store and several newly created accounts vote for it in a row. It climbs the popular list, and a first-time visitor finds an ad shaped like news at the very top.

On a voting site, your product is the ranking, and that ranking only deserves trust if the votes can be reviewed. UpVote, the ThemeWarrior theme for building sites in the style of Reddit or Hacker News, shows under each story the list of those who voted for it, with avatar and profile. That list lets you and your community recognize a group of accounts that always votes together.

Stories, votes and users in UpVote

• Link submission by registered users, through a custom plugin. Each submission is a story.
• Automatic data: title, featured image and description are taken from the link if the URL supports Open Graph.
• Registration with the WordPress form, or login with Facebook and Twitter.
• Front page lists: Popular, Trending and Recent, next to an active users page.
• Story page with vote count, voters, source link, comments, related stories and buttons for Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
• A link to report a story.
• Sidebar with recommended stories, categories, tags and trending lists, plus a separate blog.

Reviewing the ranking before someone bends it

Three parts of the demo help you watch over the site. The voters list shows who pushed each story. The active users page filters by one week, one month or six months and counts each person's stories, so someone posting nonstop stands out. The report link shares the work with your readers.

Each row also shows the source domain next to the title, which makes it easy to notice when one website repeats too often.

UpVote limits worth knowing

Among its features there is no fake-vote detection, and the monitoring stays in your hands. In the demo, the active users page shows each person's number of stories, without points or karma.

Automatic fetching depends on the linked page: if that URL does not support Open Graph, the title, image and description are not filled in by themselves.

Commenting and voting require logging in. And renaming stories, for example so your site talks about resources or news, means editing a plugin file by hand, as does changing the word story in the URL. Keep a copy of that change, because a plugin update could replace the file.

Opening registration and publishing the first stories

The theme works together with its UpVote plugin. These steps get the site ready to receive submissions:

1. Install the theme and its plugin on WordPress.
2. Enable the membership checkbox under Settings, General, so people can register.
3. Create the story categories and place the sidebar widgets.
4. Test the Facebook and Twitter login if you want to offer it.
5. Submit the first stories yourself, so nobody finds an empty front page.

If you change the word story in the URL, save the permalinks afterwards in Settings. Registration is disabled on the demo, so submission tests happen on your own install.

When your community needs to talk rather than vote

UpVote ranks links. If what you need is discussion topics with replies, ForumWP adds a forum where members open topics and reply. The Forum theme by Visualmodo is designed for communities with bbPress, BuddyPress and its own knowledge base.

For a network with profiles, groups, activity and courses, the BuddyBoss theme gives an app-like look, and it needs the platform separately.

How UpVote works day to day

Is the link title filled in automatically?

Yes, along with the image and description, when the URL supports Open Graph.

Can people log in with social networks?

It supports login with Facebook and Twitter, in addition to the normal WordPress registration.

Can you see who voted for a story?

Yes. In the demo, the voters list appears on the story page.

Can I call stories something else?

Yes, by editing the labels in the plugin's post-type.php file.