Running a successful blog is just as demanding as starting a business, meeting a goal or even running for the US presidency (exaggeration at it’s best!). It all depends on how much effort you put in and what you want to achieve with your blog.
Maintaining a successful blog and the above comparisons are by far different on many levels, but nevertheless they both require a type of confidence, a type of motivation and most importantly; a type of perseverance.
Anyways, moving on from the radical metaphors.. the point of that introduction was to highlight how hard it is to run a blog.
If you run a blog by yourself or with a friend – you know how easily how the workload can just pile up! When it comes to constantly writing good content, responding to your readers and obviously building on traffic – just too much for you to handle? Well, why don’t we eliminate “responding to your readers” as a chore and turn it in to a potential flow of targeted content?
Now, that would be a big positive because that would partially take care of two so-called “chores” of running a blog! So, what if there’s an ‘ultimate social plugin‘ that will do wonders to your site, ease your workload and EVEN please your readers? Well.. there is!
FV Community News allows your visitors to help you create more content for your site! A simple, yet ingenious plug-in to really incorporate your reader’s opinion and boost your site’s value, content and even SERPs.
As said by the developers themselves – “With this new Community News plugin you allow your visitors to add articles to the sidebar. Complete with moderation panel and a settings page, you can sit back while you have full control about the look and articles that being posted.”
Features
Currently, the Community News plugin has the following features:
- Widget Ready (Different form/results widget)
- Tags for use in posts/pages
- AJAX Form Handling
- Multi-Language Support
- Moderation panel (with email option) – Make sure you approve the right articles
- Edit Submissions
- `My Submissions` Page
- Customizable templates
- Captcha Spam protection (on/off)
- Akismet Spam protection (API key required)
- Build-in RSS 2.0 Feed
- Image Uploading
- Settings
- Uninstall Page
- Configurable Responses
The Big Bad Wolf of FV Community News
That’s all the positives, but when it comes to using this plugin there are a couple of downfalls. The whole idea of allowing your readers to contribute with useful content is great – till you get spammers that try to abuse this feature.
You might find yourself accepting/rejecting articles added via this plugin a lot more than your comments ~ so, you need to balance out between free-content and loyalty of your readers. If you having problems with spammers, I would not even hesitate to suggest the use of Akismet and BadBahvious. The combination of these two plugins will take care most of your spammers!
Quick FV Community News Information
Author : Frank Verhoeven
Wordpress Version (required): 2.5+
Tested up to Version: 2.7
Current Plug-In Version: 1.3
What does it look like?
You can see the FV Community News in action over at DivitoDesigns. The side bar on the far-right is all content added by the readers. Also here’s a quick screen-shot of the actual Admin Control Panel, which can be accessed through your Wordpress Admin CP;
Check it out, and let us know what you think!
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Never knew of this. Will give it a try one of my blogs (letssermo.com).
Hmm, this might be useful for like a pillar article site that uses many different people.
Let us know how the plugin plays out on your blogs
It looks like a decent plugin to encourage more readers’ participation. Thanks for sharing, Janith. I’m gonna explore it further.
Yan
Only one thing’s better than free content,
Free Content provided by others
hey dis is smthng new 4 me…. am gonna research on dis…
Thnx 4 sharing
Thanks! Good news
thanks for sharing this plugin
hey this is great plugin .. i m also using this