One of the easiest ways to showcase the best content in your community is the Best Of feature. Members of your community vote on the best content, as do your moderation team and staff. You and your staff also have the ability to personally curate the Best Of page through the use of the Promote reaction, which will update the page consistently as new posts are added. If your community is geared towards showing off your users’ best work, you can even make it your community homepage!
How to set up the Best Of page
To get started with Best Of, you will need to have the Reactions Addon enabled.
You will also want to take a look at the Advanced Settings for the Reactions Addon. This is where you can modify how Best Of is displayed and control how many points it takes to get on the Best Of page. Points are awarded when a member selects a reaction, therefore you can raise or lower the threshold for content to be displayed on the Best Of page.
Changing the "Promote Threshold" will control how many points are required for a post to show on Best Of. By default, it will require 5 points.
To start, the Best Of page will be blank. Once content is voted on, your Best Of page will start to be populated.
Layout Options
The standard Best of Style is "Tiles" and will appear as a Masonry layout. If you choose "List", the Best Of posts will be displayed one after the other as a list, with an image to the left and an excerpt to the right.
Sorting Options
Content will be sorted on the Best Of page according to the reactions they have received. For instance, content which has been received the Agree reaction will show when clicking Agree and so on.
Promoted Content
To show Promoted content, you will want to enable the Promote reaction. This ensures Moderators/Admins have the ability to promote the best posts in the community to the Best Of page.
Setting Up Curate Permissions
The Promote reaction, which adds 5 points to a posts score rather than the default 1 point, is normally reserved for Administrators or Moderators. For these users to have the reaction available to them, you need to ensure they have the Garden.Curation.Manage permission. You can add this permission, by going to Users > Roles & Permissions in your Vanilla Dashboard, selecting the appropriate role and checking the Curation box in the Garden section, under Manage.
Changing Your Homepage
You can set your Homepage to the Best Of page (Trending) from the Layout tab in your Vanilla Dashboard. This gives the option to have the Best Of page to welcome new users to your community.
F.A.Q.
Will only discussions show on the Best Of page?
Any content that has received the minimum points necessary will appear on the Best Of page, this will include; discussions, comments as well as questions, answers and polls if enabled.
How do I remove content from the Best Of page?
Content will need to be deleted to be removed from the Best Of page.
How is content sorted on the Best Of page and can we change this?
Content is sorted by date from when it has crossed the threshold (minimum points needed). We do not have the ability to customize the order.
Can I remove the Best of page from the navigation and side panel?
Yes, you can remove the Best Of page by add the following CSS to a Pocket;
.Reactions-BestOf,
.Navigation-link.BestOf{
display: none!important;
}
