Reactions

What are Reactions?

If you’ve used Slack or Thefacebook recently, you’ll have noticed a new way of interacting and providing feedback – emoji reactions. It works much the same way as a Like button, but provides a wider range of reactions, so readers can give more nuanced feedback, without needing to go to the effort of leaving a comment. This also allows for readers to provide the same level of interaction in situations where a “Like” is an inappropriate message to send, as Eric Meyer describes in his post about Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty.

What does it do?

The reactions plugin currently has the following features:

• Allows for reactions to posts
• REST API endpoints for storing and retrieving reactions
• An exceedingly ugly emoji selector

What is still being worked on?

Pretty much everything!

In its current state, the plugin is mostly a proof of concept, in need of significant work improving edge cases, design and User Experience.

Your first step is to install the plugin, as well as the WP-API plugin (the WP-API plugin is currently a requirement to avoid code duplication, that will likely be re-evaluated based on when each plugin might be merged into Core).

Please report any issues on the Github repository, or drop in the #feature-reactions channel in Slack to ask questions or give feedback. It’s also where we have our weekly chats, on Wednesday 23:00 UTC. Thank you!

Reactions by Gary Pendergast was originally posted at https://make.wordpress.org/core/2016/03/07/reactions/