Cool Content - How to gain popularity through Drupal modules
What's a site worth if you can't ambiguously tell authors how terrible their articles are by rating them on a scale of 1 to 5 chili peppers? How can we segregate against nodes by only allowing the popular nodes to sit at the cool nodes table? Well lucky for us we're going back to high school in this blog post as I introduce you to a few cool Drupal modules that show us how to get organic results for popular content.
Fivestar
Fivestar is one of the more basic, but useful rating modules that adds “rating stars” to content. Users rate the node based on the number of stars you made available, then you can view the average rating of the node to see how popular it is. Simple right? Fivestar is based on Voting API, is officially supported in Acquia Drupal, integrates with Views, and is easily the quickest way to add ratings to nodes.
Want to extend Fivestar? Check out Fivestar Recommender. Want your own custom Fivestar widgets? Drupal Ace can show you how in their Custom Fivestar Graphics tutorial.
Rate
Rate is pretty similar to Fivestar in the voting aspect, but it also allows for thumbs up/down, emotion ratings (funny, mad, angry), etc. It’s like Fivestar and Vote Up/Down all in one, plus a bit more. Rate also has some interesting features, such as Rate Expiration, which disallows voting after a set period of time (for that one guy who wants to down vote an article... 3 years after it was posted). Rate doesn’t allow users to cancel their vote, whereas Fivestar does. Some will bicker back and forth about which one is better, but we’ll leave that to the drama nerds and their never ending debate between Star Wars and Star Trek... Which by the way, a Star Destroyer could take on the Enterprise any day. Just ask these guys.
Want to add some visualizations? Mix it up and integrate with the Google Chart API to show off those sexy bar charts. I can hear the ladies running already.
User Points
If you want to add a bit of narcissism to your site, look no further than User Points. Okay I kid, healthy competition between users might be a better phrase. User Points allows users to gain or lose points by performing different actions on your site. This may be writing a product review or commenting on a node. With this module, the users are fighting for popularity instead of your content. User Points ties into Services, Rules, and Views which makes it even more site builder friendly.
If you’d like to extend User Points, check out this list of contrib modules to add even more functionality.
Radioactivity
If this list of modules were your high school homecoming court, then it’s time to meet your King (or Queen). We’ve met the runner-ups, but Radioactivity steals the show. This module will give you the most organic results for content based on popularity. Radioactivity provides more of a hotness meter. When an entity is getting attention (either by views or actions defined by rules), it will become hotter by an increasing energy that you set, while those that are not receiving attention are cooling down. Pretty cool, huh... er, I mean hot? You get the point.
So why the name Radioactivity? The cool down rates are based on the concept of half life, or the amount of time it takes for the quantity of something to reach half of the original value. Using Radioactivity, you create a decay profile that sets the cool down rate for the entities it is assigned. Want to know the current trending articles on your site? Set the half life to 3 hours and the granularity to 15 minutes (which is the interval of time to update the energy), and watch as the popular articles float to the top while the not-so-hots sink to the bottom in real-time. Have an ecommerce site? Integrate Radioactivity with Commerce using Commerce Product Popularity.
Of course there are a number of settings you can use in the module, such as using memcache for storing energy values, so it’d be nice if you had some direction. Though on the project page there’s a few links for tutorials or documentation, I think that Teemu Merikoski of Wunderkraut has an elegant writeup for Radioactivity.
Know of any interesting modules that help showcase popular content on your site? Let us know in the comments below.
