This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Idea Factory

Description

Idea Factory was born out of necessity, and the frustration of the lack of plugins that did exactly what I wanted it to do. This plugin allows users to submit new ideas from the front-end, and vote on them. Currently it allows a user to vote once per idea, then locks them out. It’s also currently limited to logged in users, for now.

  • AJAX powered front-end submission and voting
  • Works for both logged in and logged out users
  • 1 vote allowed per user per idea
  • Emails the admin of a new submission
  • Automatic setup or use anywhere with a shortcode
  • Optionally set a threshold where each idea will be given a status based on total votes and emails the admin
  • Automatic status grading
  • Extensible with hooks and actions on events
  • More ideas loaded with AJAX on front-end
  • Mobile friendly

Screenshots

  • What you see when you visit yoursite.com/ideas
  • User submit new ideas within a popup modal
  • New ideas are logged as a custom post type
  • You can change a few settings here
  • And more settings here

Installation

Uploading in WordPress Dashboard

  1. Navigate to ‘Add New’ in the plugins dashboard
  2. Navigate to the ‘Upload’ area
  3. Select idea-factory.zip from your computer
  4. Click ‘Install Now’
  5. Activate the plugin in the Plugin dashboard

Using FTP

  1. Download idea-factory.zip
  2. Extract the idea-factory directory to your computer
  3. Upload the idea-factory directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
  4. Activate the plugin in the Plugin dashboard

FAQ

Can I override the layout?

Yep. Copy the file from idea-factory/templates/template-ideas into your theme and it will use your file instead. Note, you’ll need to keep track of updates to the source file and update accordingly. Check out using hooks, actions, or filters for adding, or changing things.

Reviews

Satumba 29, 2016
The only thing I would like to be able to change, is for public voting to be optionally controlled via cookie instead of IP. I know this wouldn’t work for public stuff, but I’m using this within an intranet for internal suggestion box, and we all come from the same IP.
Satumba 12, 2016 2 replies
I have been looking for an ‘Ideas’ plugin for a while, this one just looks perfect as its neat, tidy and compact BUT I am so frustrated that it doesn’t work with the latest Wordpress 🙁 no matter what I try, I just can’t get the ideas to show on the front-end, it simply states “No ideas exist, why not create one”. Such a shame, if the author can revamp this plugin, I promise and commit to make a donation.
Satumba 3, 2016 3 replies
Unfortunately it does not work with the lated Wordpress version. It is a great idea, but it does not work. In my case, ideas are not shown in the frontend, even they exist in the backend and they are published. I tried for a couple of hours to debug the code, but I give up. It is a matter of minutes for the developer of the script to find the bug and fix it. For any other programmer it will take days to fix it. So, it does not worth the effort. Please, developers, take some time to fix this, as it is a great plugin.
Read all 13 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Idea Factory” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

“Idea Factory” has been translated into 1 locale. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “Idea Factory” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

1.2

  • NEW – Added an option to enable public voting
  • NEW – Added a reset button to reset public votes
  • NEW – Added “Author” to the Ideas
  • FIXED – Fixed strings that were not translatable
  • FIXED – Fixed minor security that would allow vote spoofing
  • FIXED – Added capability checks to reset events
  • FIXED – Only show the Idea Status if threshold is “on” in the ideas list
  • FIXED – Fixed broken check for admin notification
  • FIXED – Frontend UI improvements
  • FIXED – Added high priority to load the plugin styles after the theme styles to avoid CSS override and to not use !important.

1.1

  • NEW – Added a “threshold” option where, when set with a numerical value such as 10, each idea will then be automatically approved or declined based on reaching 10 or more total votes and will send the site admin an email with the status update
  • NEW – Added a dropdown box on all ideas to manually change the status
  • NEW – Added an option to manually reset all votes on all ideas back to zero
  • NEW – Added a status column within the edit posts screen to show the status of each idea
  • NEW – Added a shortcode [idea_factory] to show the ideas and voting form with options to hide the form, votes, or voting
  • NEW – Added an option to disable the automatic archive
  • TWEAK – Instead of posts being put into draft when the option is selected, they are put into “pending” allowing proper review

1.0

  • Initial Release