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Is it possible to use WordPress as a “Digg” site? The answer is yes!

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300x250 Is it possible to use WordPress as a Digg site? The answer is yes!

Some months ago, WpHacks introduced a site I just created, called WpVote. The purpose of WpVote was to give the WordPress community a Digg-like website where people can share their blog posts and promote it.

Many WordPress users thought it was a good idea and I quickly had a lot of members, due to the great promotion from WpHacks. Sadly, spammers came too. And they were very, very active.

WpVote was using the Pligg cms. Sadly, this tool isn’t very flexible and modify it isn’t easy at all. I’ve tried a few anti-spam solution but nothing worked. Quickly, the site became a spam-farm and I, as well as the users, abandonned it.

But last month, I thought “If only WpVote was running within WordPress”. I’ve never heard of any “Digg-like” site using WordPress, but I thought that I can give a try. I was easier than it seemed. 2 weeks before, I had a new version of WpVote, ready to be used by the community.

Was it hard to create? Not really. I didn’t modify the WP core, but instead used the TDO Mini Forms plugin, a custom theme I created and a few Ajax functions. Though, the fact that I know WordPress quite well helped me a lot to achieve this goal and think how I can make it work.

wpvote Is it possible to use WordPress as a Digg site? The answer is yes!

Now, a few words about the brand new version of WpVote:

WpVote works just like million other sites like Digg: Once registered, you can submit news, tutorials, hacks and everything related to WordPress. Once your story received at least 5 votes, it is promoted to the front page. Good luck for DoFollow lovers, our Pagerank 4 frontpage IS DoFollow!

So if you’re a WordPress addict and want to promote your posts to the community as well as gaining free backlinks, don’t hesitate to join us. Note that if you were a member of the previous version, you’ll have to register again due to the change of platform.

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    • Jean-Baptiste Jung is a blogger/web developer/web designer who lives in the French-Speaking part of Belgium. Jean-Baptiste maintains two blogs: Cats Who Code.com where he and other authors write about Web Development, Web design, Blogging tips and WordPress, and WPRecipes.com where Jean shares useful WordPress snippets on a daily basis. When he's not blogging or having fun with codes, Jean loves to spend time with his wife and cat, and traveling everywhere he can.

    There Are 19 Responses So Far »

    • Adam Dempsey

      I’ve recently been working on a vote-like site for wishlist ideas. I’m using WordPress with the TDO Mini Forms and Vote It Up plugins.

    • http://www.serradinho.com George Serradinho

      Wow, sounds like you have been busy. Nice to hear it is working now.

    • http://kyleeslick.com Kyle Eslick

      Jean,

      WP Vote looks great! I think this continues to prove just how flexible WordPress is :mrgreen:

    • http://www.catswhocode.com Jean-Baptiste Jung

      @Kyle Eslick: Definitely! It’s very amazing to see all the things you can do with it!

      @All: If you write about WordPress, feel free to join WpVote and promote your posts!

    • http://wrestlepedia.info Dean Saliba

      I agree with Kyle Eslick, this really does prove how much you can do with WordPress that you can’t do with other blog platforms.

    • http://www.shoutmeloud.com p@r@noid

      Great move…congrats for WPvote
      nice initiative :)

    • http://youngistaan.org Dev

      Wpvote looks great..

    • http://thedeadone.net Mark

      Wow, impressive. I always thought about putting together a site like that before, but never got around to it. Any particular features of TDO Mini Forms that swung it from pligg for you?

    • ellewebb

      Would love to see you document what you did so that others could learn from it!

    • http://wpvote.com/customise-wordpress-functions Best Blogs

      Maybe now will see many of these sites popping up in 2009?

    • Christopher

      Is it possible to use WordPress as a “Digg” site? The answer is “Not Quite!” Should really have been the title of this article which is regretable after the previous problems with spam Wpvote had i hoped they had got it right this time.

      I actually tried the site out after reading this article with high hopes that JPB had managed to create a Digg type solution for wordpress that functioned similarly to digg, after a few moments using Wpvote however my initial excitment turned to disapointment upon testing the site out :(

      It’s a great concept to make a social news site out of wordpress but wpvote has some teething issues, i could vote multiple times for a submission, taking the vote from 3 to 8 by refreshing the page and voting again leaving the system wide open to abuse. There are only two categories incomming articles and published articles which seemed rather slim pickings and ultimatley will leave content hard to find after a few weeks. The search function uses google search which dosen’t seem to work for me with results that have been submitted to wpvote not showing up as they haven’t been indexed yet by google, It may have been better tweaking wordpress internal search engine rather than using google.

      For me personally Wpvote simply isn’t a digg type site at all with very, very limited features and without getting some hefty custom plugins or core WP modifications in the future it will struggle to fulfil that goal :( sorry

    • http://artsdir.blogspot.com Blogger Templates

      Great site, Very nice modifications, l will also try to make one as a web directory, really nice idea. thanks for giwing it to me.

    • Sulumits Retsambew

      Impressive, WordPress functionality seems to be limitless.

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    • http://wordtaps.com mupet

      Im also create similiar site using wordpress. I was try to using pligg and SWCMS. But both of them is not easy to modify. Using wordpress and vote it up plugin I successfully create it.

    • Eva

      I would like to make TDO like Wpvote. Could anyone suggest them which beautifull like WPvote?

    • http://whois.domaintools.com Mira

      @mupet how did you achieved the goal please advice

    • Damien

      I think it would be possible to do this with a wp like plugin I have devised, I am currently pulling avatars and stuff for a vote on posts, but the ID for the ‘liked’ post as well as the ID of the user who voted is stored in the DB making it possible to pull the highest rated articles first, as a popular articles list.
      http://tak79.com/wp-liked-plugin/
      I believe with some tweaking it would be possible to bump and sort the posts according to the vote like digg, I aslo have a front end submit on another site that would suit this theme idea perfectly.

    • http://watch-daybreakers-online-free.wetpaint.com Larhonda Kerska

      Another Excellent blog post, I will save this in my Reddit account. Have a good evening.

    • http://itrevino.com Matt

      Combine Wp-Postratings + TDO Miniforms and you have a voting system that can be sorted by votes (for free) and out of the box. (With minor minor theme tweaking).