How was the talk "Gamifica tu WordPress"

The numbers

Registered for the talk: 43 people.
Attendants: 24 people.
It was held on December 16, 2019 in the space provided by ULab, the co-working center of Alicante.

Important: We remind you that in the tool Slack have a channel registered to organize and to share the management of the meetup, specifically the channel we use is #wpalicante of Slack WordPress Spain. If you want to lend a hand, contribute ideas and become more active part of this community follow the instructions on the following page-> http://wp-es.es/slack/

Game-up your WordPress: The Talk

We are more than ready to wish you a Merry Christmas, and what better proposal for this time of year with so many holidays and gifts than the one we make you from WPAlicante: to get the visitors and users of our website to have a great time interacting with us. To this end, this month we propose you in the space of ULab gamify your website. From Flavia Bernárdez we bring you a GPL plugin and on top of that a Alicante one, what more could you ask for! This is the GamiPress plugin, which we detail below. Flavia not only hosts our WordPress talks but also supports the courses at boluda.com and, as if that weren't enough, she organizes film-related events with ImajovenThe film is shown at the ULab itself and at other locations in Alicante (from screenings to talks on film promotion).

Of course, the classic round of questions at the end of the talk, typical of all meetingups, cannot be missed, as well as the traditional networking accompanied by refreshments at the kiosk in the Plaza de San Cristobal thanks to our sponsor: WeglotThe WordPress Plugin to translate your website into the language of your choice. You can try it out without any obligation as it is free to use for translating up to 2000 words into one language, and it takes up very little space on the server.

We leave you the link to the shared presentation during the talk and here are some points that we found interesting. although we include at the end of this entry The full video of the presentation.

Fundamentals: What is gamification and its advantages

Gamification or ludification consists of introducing game mechanics into an area that is not playful in itself. In our case, it involves adding challenges to a website or online store based on defined actions, such as the purchase of certain products. Also included is a census of achievements and a ranking of the position with respect to the rest of the users.

One of the first applications to use this system was FourSquare, which gave points for "marking" the places you went for coffee and also gave points for discovering new places, although it ended up losing steam because it didn't know how to monetize the situation. It eventually evolved into what is now Swarm.

Another area where gamification is causing a furore is in exercise applications, from walking, running, cycling, swimming... For both runners and cyclists, the king of applications is Strava, which stores both your personal and general achievements, which you can try to overcome.

You can also include gamification for your own use in the form of a social network, with the "I like", number of followers, the number of times it is shared...

The main advantages of gamification are:

Feeling of commitment and to feel rewarded for the use of our website or services: the rewards bring happiness to the users.
Satisfaction by performing a series of steps to achieve an achievement: when the achievement is achieved, a state of fullness is generated that makes the user use our website and services again.
Our users' data to know them better: this allows us to offer them personalized products or services thanks to the information they provide us with. This also makes them feel more at home and come back.

WordPress gamification plugins

There are several plugins that allow us to introduce gamification on our website. One of the best known we have:

BadgeOSThe "S" is one of the oldest that is still in operation. From our point of view it has become a bit old-fashioned as gamification focuses only on creating / getting medals. Still, you can take a look at it because maybe it also makes it very easy to start gamifying our website.
MyCREDThe "S" is quite well known and offers many possibilities, it has a lot of potential. The only drawback is that both the documentation and the plugin itself are quite rough, not very friendly for the administrator. And we understand that usability is important when choosing a plugin.
GamiPressThe most popular one, both in terms of possibilities and usability. It is very intuitive and easy to use and is constantly evolving. It is continuously releasing new add-ons and interesting new features.

GamiPress: the WordPress plugin for gamification

GamiPress - The #1 gamification plugin to reward points, achievements, badges & ranks in WordPress

This plugin is free. Monetization comes from some of the add-ons that add interesting functionality.

It is mainly based on the implementation of three types of Custom Post Types (CPT)Points, Achievements and Ranks, which you can also change the name to better suit the theme of your website. For example, instead of Points, you can call it Gems, Coins, Credits...

PointsThe lowest level that can be "scored" on a website. Depending on a series of actions, your website users can earn these points.
AchievementsThe typical medal, badge, insignia... They can be assigned from certain points or by accumulation of certain actions. They are collected to improve the user's position in a ranking.
RangesThe levels to which you can aspire within the web. These are the typical military ranks of ensign, lieutenant, captain, colonel... but taken to the gamification and according to the rank you have you will be able to access some sites or others within the web.

It also has an error console for the site administrators, in case something goes wrong.

Points

The plugin is very versatile and not only allows you to gain points but also to lose them. Of course, it is not mandatory to define the two possibilities, you can just keep the option of winning them. The point system is defined by you.

To do this, a series of actions must be associated with gaining or losing points. The plugin itself is already defined by default:

WordPress Own ActionsIt also includes integrations with other known plugins, so you can include actions of those other plugins, such as WooCommerce. All these integrations are free of charge.
Interactions with the siteThese actions would be those of the external user, i.e. the public part of the website, such as visiting specific pages/entries.
Own GamiPressThe "Actions": These are the specific actions of the plugin, for example, gaining points by unlocking achievements, moving up in rank...

The way to create points is quite intuitive and it's also in Spanish, so we have to read the sections that the plugin shows us. Each type of action can be assigned:

One number maximum points to be achieved in a unit of time determined, so that a user does not get bogged down in a particular action and earns millions of points in a day. You could get a certain category of points, for example, once a week.
Items in "draft" state to formalize them at a certain time.
One label to explain how you get that category of points.
A on/off statusThe "Campaign": this way we can define many different typologies and activate only those that interest us at a given time, to create campaigns according to the season, for example.
Shortcodes or Gutenberg blocksThe "Points" section of the site allows you to include information on how you can gain/lose points from the site, in a fairly visual way, depending on what you have previously defined. You also have a package of predefined icons that you can associate with each CPT (a free basic package and a premium package with more colors per icon). You can associate icons downloaded from other pages such as flaticon.com. There is also a shortcode for the user to see the points he has so far. In the presentation (slide 19) you have a link to a specific document where this part is explained in more detail.

Achievements

These are typical medals. It's a more elaborate scoring system than the one we have explained on points, since much more text can be added, much more content, it gives a more extensive compliment and it can be associated with a content, a group of objectives.

As for how to get an achievement:

There is one very cool feature and that is that you can set up a series of steps to obtain it in such a way that the user knows at all times which steps he has already achieved and which he still has to complete to achieve the achievement. This is very important, for example, for academies, which may establish a course schedule and need to complete it to get the badges for those courses. These steps can be set sequentially or not, i.e. it is indicated whether step 1 needs to be completed before step 2 can begin, or they can be performed in parallel.
Achievements can also be made when you reach a range.
You can assign hitchhiker's medalsIf the administrator considers it, he assigns specific medals to specific users without having a specific pattern programmed.

Being prepared for Gutenberg, at the end you can include in the definition of the achievements quite content by being able to add the blocks that interest us. The plugin itself includes a basic layout to include the achievement on the website.

Achievements also have associated shortcodes specific to this type of CPT for:

Show the achievements of a user, which includes a search filter in case a user has many achievements and is interested in seeing only some specific ones.

Ranges

These are the levels of all life. To be able to define how to go from one range to the next you need to have created at least two different ranges. When you sign up as a web user, you automatically access the lowest level range so if there is only one range defined you will not see the options of how to get to that range. From the second you will see those options to fill them in.

The way to achieve rank is similar to achievement:

By pointsThe "Redeemer": redeeming part of the points you've earned to move up to a certain rank.
By requirementsThe following is a list of the ranks that we consider necessary to achieve each rank
HitchhikingRange: assigning a range to a specific user without any previously established criteria.

When creating a range, we define the type of range we want, for example, "LEVELS" and within that range we already establish the different scales that are part of it. This is because we could have different typologies of ranks on our website

Final networking questions and issues

QUESTIONHow is gamification reflected in an entry?

RESPONSEUsing the mentioned shortcodes or Gutenberg blocks. With them you will be able to show the user both the instructions so that he knows how to get each of the elements (points, achievements, ranks) and his situation, that is, the ones that that user has achieved so far. The explanation can include buttons that take you to the site where the associated action is to be performed, if it is a question of visiting a specific section of the website, for example. All this is very useful for websites that offer services, where premium services can be enabled if you perform certain actions. An example can be seen in the screenshot LOOM. To get months of free premium features you have to do a number of things (this is used a lot by service companies), for example, send an affiliate link to several friends, share it on facebook... On Windows 10 you can also take screenshots and record videos thanks to the Windows Game DVR, which is included in Windows10 as part of the Xbox integration and which is also useful when you play through other platforms such as Steam.

QUESTIONThe plugin seems to be focused, among other things, on user management. But, can you manage users registered only in the WordPress user system or also users that you register with a specific plugin?

RESPONSENormally, even if you have registered a plugin to manage users, in the end they must end up being WordPress users. For example, the WooCommerce roles are registered on a WordPress user type called Customer. In case you are not a WordPress user, because you use another type of element to save those users, such as specific CPTs, you should ask the Plugin developer to see the possibility of integrating it with GamiPress. Ultimately, if the Plugin does use the WordPress USER unit for its work, it would work.

QUESTIONAre you using GamiPress right now for anything in particular?

RESPONSENot right now, but I do want to start using it with an opinion and publication website of the city of Cádiz because I have seen that the website lacks a relationship with the users to motivate them to interact. To implement gamification in blogs, I really like how it does medium.comThe Blogging Platform, where all the content generated is processed in different categories and you can also create your own website. In all the publications you can add "applauses" and when you reach a number of applauses you can unblock articles of other authors. This way medium introduces an internal gamification system to encourage the interaction between the own collaborators of the web.

QUESTIONIs there a way to move a website from a platform like Wix to WordPress?

RESPONSEWhen we want to see if there is a plugin for that, it is best to Google "Wix (or whatever platform) to WordPress Plugin" and analyze the answers found. In our case there are several articles that should be reviewed because they may be interesting. At plugin level they suggest the following: https://wordpress.org/plugins/cms2cms-wix-to-wp-migrator/ although the WordPress website tells us that it's been temporarily disabled since 02/12/2019 pending a complete overhaul, so if the migration is urgent we'll have to check the other options that are being considered in the articles that appear in the search.

QUESTIONI saw this morning a meetingup in Cartagena about WooCommerce integration with Amazon and I am quite interested in the topic. What do you know about it? Can they really be integrated well?

RESPONSEWooCommerce already has an integrated product type which is the affiliate. When you install WooCommerce you have several types of products: the simple, the variable, the grouped and one that is called EXTERNAL. The latter can be used to include any affiliate product. What happens is that normally it is not done that way because you don't really need WooCommerce to include concerted affiliate products on your website. You can directly open an Amazon, Aliexpress or any other sales platform affiliate account and from there you can set up your page with your tickets (they can be opinion articles) including the links that the sales platform generates for the products you want to include in your website, without having to install WooCommerce. There's a lot of membership sites who talk about it and teach you how to set up an affiliate site.

QUESTIONWhat is better, simply a WordPress with WooCommerce or Shopify?

RESPONSE It's two different things. Shopify is an online shop service on WordPress but outside your system, your server, and takes a percentage of commission on each sale (2 or 3%, for example). The good thing is that you don't have to set up your own online store or know about WordPress or WooCommerce, you just have to upload your products to their platform. The bad thing, besides the commission, is that you depend on the owners of the system and if at any time they close, you would be left without a store. You have to balance the comfort and ease of service with the economy you can afford and your time to set up on your own.

Glossary

Custom Post TypeCustom posts: These are customized posts in WordPress, that is, specific types of publications that we design for our website, whose use allows us to adapt our WordPress to our needs to the millimeter. Once a Custom Post Type has been created, it will appear in the menu on the left, with its properties. They cannot be done directly but we need to install some plugin that allows us to design them.
Membership SiteA website that normally has restricted access for those users who register (either free or with some kind of fee). Once registered you have access to the content that this website offers. Access can be to the entire website or to certain premium content. There are several types of membership sites depending on the content they offer. They can be communityby offering you a space for people with the same interests, product selling a specific product or type of product, and therefore specialized that generates more confidence, workingoffering a concrete service of higher quality...