Do you want to build an engaged group of users to find the best content in your niche? Are you looking to build an active and informed community like Product Hunt or Hacker News? Do you have an existing audience and want to tap their knowledge to create a dynamic and valuable resource?
Built on the excellent and popular WordPress platform, Rank It WP creates a site that makes it easy for thought leaders, subject matter experts, and others to submit and rank content right on your domain. Intuitive controls, fast, on-page interaction, and simple moderation tools make community building as simple and easy as possible.
We want to make this theme as effortless as possible while still providing you with modern tools for community building. The features below are just a highlight of what’s available in Rank It WP. We push out major feature updates on a regular basis and take requests from our users to make sure you’re using the best tool possible.
Simple and fast content submission with moderation toolsYou want your audience to be able to submit what they find with as few obstacles as possible. Rank It WP makes that possible with an easy-to-use, on-page submission form available everywhere on the site. Logged-in users see a simple pop-up with just the fields they need to post links. Site administrators can set submission limits and control what content appears on the site. Approving content is just one click, making it easy to keep your site fresh and dynamic.
Fully mobile optimized for all device sizesMobile browsers now account for a significant share of all website traffic. We built Rank It WP to be a pleasure to use on all devices, from smartphones to tablets all the way up to desktop screens. Functionality on small screens should not be limited so we adjusted the layout using responsive styling to make sure everything works regardless of what device your visitors are using.
Front-end login and registrationKeep your site visitors right where they want to be: on the right page, ready to interact with your content. User accounts are valuable for site administrators because they reduce spam, create accountability, and let you see who is engaged with your site. They are valuable for users to promote themselves, save their history, and connect with other people. We want to make this often-arduous process a little simpler so we rethought the WordPress login flow and made it as simple (and secure) as possible.
Change styles right in the adminMake your Rank It WP site look how you like with simple color, voting icon, and font options. Choose from hundreds of free Google fonts, multiple color options, and several icons to encourage your users to interact.
Add images, categories, and tagsSubmissions from users can include single or multiple categories (or none at all) and administrators can add tags and images. Choose the size and styling of your images easily in the admin panel and display lists of ranked submissions under each category or tag. You can even choose the link structure!
Order content by rating or by publish datePopular communities like Product Hunt, Hacker News, and Reddit calculate a rating for each piece of content to determine its order on the site. Rank It WP can use this type of ranking to order content (more explanation here) or just simply by publish date; the choice is yours!
On-page commentingWordPress benefits from a fully-featured commenting system that includes spam checking and moderation controls. Rank It WP uses this system and extends it, making comments by registered users quick and easy and adding additional spam controls. Comments can be held for moderation or published immediately based on a number of built-in criteria.
Rank It WP uses the core profile editing features in WordPress but keeps your site’s branding, styles, and navigation to create a more consistent experience. Plugin functionality for users, like custom avatars, is retained.
Media embeds, related items, category listing, share linksEach link submission page can display automatic media embeds, commenting (explained above), related items, category list, and share links. This creates a valuable page on your site for every link that is submitted which is great for SEO, incoming links, and user engagement. Use one, all, or none of these features to create a site that’s just what you want.
We’re a big fan of the “WordPress Way” so we support all core functionality right out of the box. Create a fully-featured blog, add widgets to your interior pages, create and customize menus, built out static content using pages, and so much more!
The web is growing larger and larger everyday, we don’t have to tell you that. Some estimates say that there are 50 billion indexed pages now, more information than one person could ever hope to read. Every day, thousands of blogs are born and millions of posts are published. The firehose of data, tutorials, opinions, videos, images, comments, and news stories gets wider and wider.
How can I stay on top of this?
It’s pretty clear that you aren’t going to read everything out there, probably not even a half of a half of a percent if you committed your life to doing so. But all this new information being created is not worth your time, nor is most of it relevant to what you do, professionally and personally. This creates a different question:
How can I find the best information being created?
The key to staying on top of what’s being published is to create a system that helps you discover and prioritize the information that exists. Sure, you can spend hours per day monitoring, scanning, and bookmarking your top news sources but even then you’re missing out on some of the best content because there’s just too much out there.
The solution? Tap into a community of passionate people to help you find and rank the best information in your category. More simply: find and niche and get help.
How and why should I choose a niche?
WordPress.com says that there were 65 million posts created using their system in October 2014. Depending on the estimate, this is around 10-15% of all blog posts total, so potentially 650 million posts per month on thousands of different topics. Want to stay relevant and up-to-date? Pick a specific subject and concentrate your efforts.
That’s the “why” but what about the “how?” How do you choose what to curate?
First, choose a topic that has value in what you do personally and/or professionally. This value could be wanting to learn about a new industry or becoming a thought leader for a particular topic. Imagine that your site was the go-to place for news in, say, the road cycling community or the craft brewing world. How could this help your existing business sell more gear or bring more people to your tasting room?
Second, choose a topic that you care about and have passion for. Communities can’t grow out of nothing and some of the best ones out there are lead by people who truly care about what is going on in that world. The niche you choose should be interesting to you (or your editors) so you can make it interesting to others.
Why should I get help?
Besides the hundreds of millions of new pages each month?
One part of this is, of course, the magnitude of the information out there. A handful of people can find great information for a particular topic but the job is too large without an army of full-time news junkies.
But the other part is serendipity. Filtering your incoming information using RSS feeds, email subscription, and alerts can help with managing discovery but things will always fall through the cracks. There might be an article on focus that is not specifically written for the cycling community but contains great information on achieving distance goals. There might be an article on unique fruits that was geared towards foodies but contains valuable tips for someone looking to integrate new flavors into their home brew.
With an engaged community working on your behalf, you not only increase the ground you can cover, you also increase the amount of related and useful information included in your feed.
Need examples? Just look at Product Hunt, a community of people who find the best software and gadgets available online. This curated community of active users finds incredible hidden gems which get rated and discussed, creating a huge amount of value for those involved ($16M worth of value, if you count their recent funding). Hacker News is another great example of group curation, this one for tech news. If you write code or work online, this site is an absolute must-read. Finally, who can forget Reddit? With 150M page views every month and a recent $50M funding round, Reddit shows that communities of people working together to sort information is here to stay.
How can Rank It WP help?
We built Rank It WP to help with all the problems inherent in staying on top of information in a particular niche. Using a simple submission and moderation system, site creators can choose the best of the best from their audience. We worked hard to build a site that is not only useful but easy and fun to use on any web-enabled device out there.
To promote community interaction, we included vibrant and dynamic user profiles that show what people are interacting with and what they have submitted. To make sure the best get to the top, we built in a content rating system that lets your audience show what they like. The keep the conversation going, we made commenting quick and easy, with comments saving right on the same page they were submitted.
All these features come together to make it simple and fun for your audience to contribute to your site and get noticed in their community.
We think you’ll love what you see right out of the box but we’re always working on new features based on your feedback. If you have any questions about what this theme can do and what’s in the pipeline, don’t hesitate to contact us!
We’re just getting started! If you have a Rank It WP site you love and would like to share, contact us with your site link and we’ll include it here.
“I use Rank It WP to curate the best WordPress Posts and resources around the web on PostWP. The plugin has made it possible to build such platform entirely on WordPress!”
–Pradeep Singh, PostWP
“Absolutely love the Rank it WP theme. It helped me get from idea to launch lightning fast. The theme is extremely well built, looks great, and offers good flexibility. Highly recommended!”
–KidsAppHunt
“Rank It WP theme was the perfect solution to our problem: How to build a Product Hunt clone quickly and easily. Not only does it fit our requirements perfectly, Josh (the developer) has been extremely helpful on the few times we've had to contact him. And since it is running on WordPress (rather than node.js or some other stack), we don't need to have a DevOps team to run our site.”
–BierWerx
“Having this theme for my company is priceless. It works incredibly well and is very customizable! When I've had some questions and user-error moments, Josh was very quick to respond and that's incredibly important in my field. It's a safe and reassuring feeling running my theme dependable business, knowing that the creator of the theme will respond quickly to address my concerns. I've been having so much fun using this theme and so have my clients and users! Highly recommended!!”
–JZ, founder at Song Rumors
“Launching an online community, the most important things are hustle, growth, and engagement. While tech is crucial, getting bogged down in it can be a deadly mistake for early communities. RankItWP had all the functionality we needed right out of the box, so we can focus on growing the ReadThisThing community.”
–Austin Smith, ReadThisThing
“I work in action sports and had an idea to create a community to discuss new products for boardsports. I found the Rank It WP theme and created Boardriders Collection. Completely blown away by the backend functionality of the theme, the algorithm to rank new submissions, and the overall look and feel of the theme. Great work by PROPER!”
–Eddie DaRoza
