Needed: Plugin to allow for multiple image voting

[oscuh]

We need to develop a website, possibly in Wordpress (but not necessary) that allows for viewers to simultaneously view multiple thumbnails and vote on up to 5 at time as their favorites. I'd like it work so that when you click on the thumbnail, it expands as a pop-up style window, but then you can collapse for voting.

When you've selected the 5 you want to vote for, you can then click a Vote button. You would only be allowed to vote once per day, so IP address capturing would be necessary.

If anyone has a plug-in or information on where I could find something like this, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!

 

[SrWebDeveloper]

I noticed no responses for awhile, decided to wait to see if anyone had something to say, apparently not.

Hope ya don't take this the wrong way but your request seems more like a complex list of requirements, each simple enough by themselves, but when combined becomes a far more complex site. Asking for "something like this" as you put it might be a problem, i.e. I've not seen one script that does all this:

1) Pulls x images to create thumbnails from database or whatever source
2) Displays x in row, allow picking from 1-5 from x
3) Also display lightbox style image popup when selected/mouse over
4) Process those selected as voted, involves server side form processing and database updating
5) Limit voting to once per day by storing IP in said database

And you didn't even mention how the "most popular" images would be displayed, so any advice we offer would have to involve simple database structures so you could adapt scripts to accomplish that easily in the future. Not to mention if your platform even supports database, assuming it does (MySQL) since you would prefer Wordpress integration if possible.

It comes down to this...

The closest I could find happens to be a WordPress module, it's called NextGen (image gallery) and comes with a voting extension:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery-voting/

You could use that as a starting point and hack the rest. Beyond that, if you get no other recommendations, consider coding it from scratch as well because it might be less work than modifying someone else's code by dealing with incompatibilities and requirements and a steep learning curve overall to learn a very strict API.

I am just letting you know don't expect a simple response or single recommendation for all the features you listed. If it happens that way, or you can get NextGen to work for you, awesome. Just keep the expectations real.

Hope you understand what I'm getting at, and hope this helps you! Honest.

-jim

 

[oscuh]

Jim,

Your feedback is appreciated. I'm not a web developer, so while I know what I want, I don't know exactly how to get there (I know enough html to be dangerous.. VERY dangerous ). Just trying to help out a coworker find solutions. To be honest, we have a site that does all of this that was coded by our former web tech, but alas, he was fired

Now we're left trying to either take the convoluted, unorganized mess he left us (it's bad.. REALLY bad) and make it work for this year's round of voting, or come up with a new alternative, hence this post. I will forward your suggestions on to our new web guy and see if he can run with it. Thanks again!

 

[SrWebDeveloper]

There is no greater Hell for a developer than when he or she must try to figure out and integrate the code of another developer who is no longer available, and might not have even had the common courtesy to add enough helpful comments into the source. I understand -- completely.

Good plan, stay tuned here for followups from others, but in the long run either you'll be adapting the old code or, if the client is open minded and time and budget allows, maybe the WordPress plugins won't be a perfect match to your specs but actually a "better" way of doing it in the long run.

-jim

 

[notjustjay]

You might be able to get away with cobbling together a couple of different WordPress plugins to get what you need.

For example, there are plenty of Lightbox/Colorbox plugins to view images in popup windows, so that's taken care of.

There are also poll/voting plugins, many with options for how many votes you can make at a time, and they take care of cookie/IP tracking to prevent multiple votes.

So all you need to do is a way to pull in photos. WordPress has its own gallery system (pretty basic), and you can get plugins to pull in photos from ZenPhoto, or other popular gallery scripts. Many of them allow you to specify shortcodes for individual images or entire galleries.

So there's an easy way and a hard way to integrate these.

The easy way: create a post/page and pull in all the photos to be voted on. Give them all a number (using an <OL>, let's say, styled however you want them to be displayed). Then create a corresponding poll that asks which ones you liked, and you check off the numbers. Gallery of pictures at the top of the post, voting poll at the bottom. Obviously the disadvantage here is the disconnect between the two.

The harder way: Hack the voting script to allow you to enter individual image shortcodes (or raw HTML) as the poll items, so that the picture thumbnail (with link) is used where normally there would be item text. This might not actually be that hard to do, it just depends on the order in which WordPress interprets shortcodes (and whether or not the poll script sanitizes the item inputs).