WebWise Solutions

At the recent Lullabot training at Portland, I was thrilled to give a quick demo of how my company is using User Points to create a rewards program for our community members.

As part of the demo, I showed our "Top Contributors" module. This module simply builds a block that lists the site's top 10 contributors and links to a page that lists the entire (sortable) list of contributors.

Some of the attendees encouraged me to release the module so, here it is. It's not rocket science (in fact it's extremely simple) but it's my first small step in a new and exciting direction.

Differentiators?

How does this functionality differ from what's included in the core User Points module?

In a rewards system like ours, users are allowed, even encouraged, to cash in their points for prizes like digital cameras or MP3 players. The trick is to keep from penalizing users who cash in their points by lowering their rank on the various user lists. The Top Contributors module does this by listing the user's "Lifetime" points in the block and their "Lifetime" and "Current" points in the page.

Also, with the new 3.x release of User Points, it's difficult to find a report that displays a user's cumulative points without sifting through categories. Don't get me wrong, categories are very cool and I hope to find a way to put them to work in the near future but sometimes they make it difficult to display a simple point balance.

Click to view.

The Top Contributors module works with User Points 2.x or 3.x but was designed with 3.x in mind. It's part of the comprehensive "userpoints_contrib" package of modules that you can download here: http://drupal.org/node/211965