What are Reactions?

If you’ve used SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. 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 pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party currently has the following features:

• Allows for reactions to posts
• REST APIREST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/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-APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. plugin is currently a requirement to avoid code duplication, that will likely be re-evaluated based on when each plugin might be merged into CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.).

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!

#feature-plugins, #reactions