Enable likes after changing status

Hi @liekenetherlands,

The plugin kind of facilitates this to some degree, but you need to keep in mind the typical workflow of these kinds of things. Typically you have an open forum where people can vote, this is the open stage. Once an idea graduates, it is now achieved its aim, so there’s no need to be able to vote on it anymore as it’s already reached a threshold that you or others deems as important. So in short, no, once an idea graduates there’s no ability to continually vote on it because what would be the need to do this.

However, just because an idea has graduated, it doesn’t mean voters are no longer in the loop, they can still receive emails when statuses change, and in the pro version of the plugin there’s the ability to send ad hoc emails to voters of a particular idea (please see feature 5: https://northernbeacheswebsites.com.au/ideapush-pro/).

If it is super important that voting continues indefinitely then you should just set the voting threshold amount to an unreachable number like 99999 or something.

Technically it is possible to allow voting on other statuses beside open ideas, however it requires core code customisation. Specifically the removal of the if condition on line 820 on idea-list-items.php.

Thanks,

Thank you for your quick response!

I definitely understand that voting no longer as a purpose as soon as an idea has gathered enough likes.

However, it is more focused on users being able to easily keep track of an idea they haven’t voted for in the beginning. The automatic update emails are very handy for that purpose!

If I remove that line in the code, I don’t break other functions of the plugin? I’m a bit scared because the plugin is quite awesome ??

Hi @liekenetherlands,

If you remove that line of code it shouldn’t break anything at all I am pretty certain. Just remember you need to remove that line and the corresponding closing } which is on line 872. Of course if you make this change you won’t be able to update the plugin without overriding the change and having to redo it again, so keep that in mind.

Good news and bad news…

I edited this and it works: I can now keep liking an idea, not matter the amount of likes or the current status.

But: the idea jumps back to status ‘reviewed’ when I do.

So for example:
-An idea is entered
-Gets the amount of likes required to pass the threshold
-Status automatically changes to ‘reviewed’
-We start working on the idea and change the status to ‘approved’, ‘in progress’ or even ‘completed’.
-Somebody likes the idea
-Status automatically jumps back to ‘reviewed’

This means this is no solution, because an idea shouldn’t go back to an old status en we’ll lose track of the statuses.

Any idea how to work around that?

Please see the file: create-vote.php and look around line 217, this is where the code sets the status to reviewed if the vote threshold is reached. You will want to comment out lines of code in this area to suit your preferences on what actions you want or don’t want to happen. I am not going to give you a specific prescription here because you are a free user of the plugin and the changes you are requested are beyond the standard support. Thanks,

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions. I checked it out, but I will not be doing any manual coding. I will most likely break something.

The plugin works great without this feature! I just think being able to follow ideas, no matter de status, would be a good addition.

Will definitely think about getting pro if this is added. Because having to manually change things with updates doesn’t sound great to me ??

Hi @liekenetherlands,

If you get the pro version, what I can do is do a customisation which would enable you to override just that specific function, and I could give you the function and instructions to get it working. That way, you can still get plugin updates.

I appreciate the feature is important for you, however it’s just not been requested by anyone over several years, and to prevent the plugin being Frankensteined, I need to keep a check on settings and features. So this is why I think the ability to override the function would be a good middle ground in this circumstance.

So yeah if that’s something you want to do now or in the future, feel free to buy the pro version, and send me an email at: [email protected] and I can hook things up for you. Thanks,