Ultimate Social Plugin for WordPress: FV Community News

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!

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