Add a Voting System To WordPress with Vote It Up

Many of you have already seen how Digg and Reddit.com work. These sites aggregate stories from around the web and let their visitors vote stories up and down. That makes it easier for their visitors to find stories that are worth reading, with the help of the community behind those sites. Adding a similar functionality to your own website wouldn’t hurt your cause. At the very least, you can help your visitors make their thoughts known about each and every post on your blog. If you spend enough of your time to make sure your posts are of high quality, you shouldn’t be too worried about the votes you get on your posts.

Vote It Up is a cool WordPress plugin that adds a 2 way voting system to WordPress. Your visitors can vote stories up and down. It provides you with the opportunity to modify its skins to change the look and feel of the buttons on your website.

This plugin is flexible enough to allow you to switch from text votes to image votes if you prefer. You can also define what text shows up after a vote is cast. ‘Permissions” is the most important part of this plugin. If you don’t want everyone to vote on a post, you can make the option exclusive to your members. Also, if you are using this plugin to gauge the performance of an author on your blog, you can turn off their ability to vote on their stories.

It is possible to use this plugin to find out which posts are popular among your visitors. Instead of using a regular “popular post plugin” that counts the hits on your posts, you can use Vote It Up to show those posts with the most scores in your sidebar.

This plugin is not for everyone. Some people can’t handle getting negative feedback from their visitors. Those people are better off installing a plugin that only allows positive votes. Others can use this plugin to ask their visitors to vote on goods and services (as well as on their posts). Pretty useful tool all around.