‘Like’ Publishing Pages in SharePoint 2013

‘Liking’ content is one of the new capabilities of SharePoint 2013. And while it works perfectly for Documents and List Items, it doesn’t seem very useful for Publishing Pages. So how would you Like a Publishing Page?

‘I Like This’

In the past many intranets were mostly about broadcasting content to employees. On-line interaction and discussions weren’t that important and getting the information to the people was good enough.

With the advent of social things are changing however. Nowadays social features not only facilitate discussions and collaboration but are also a way for organizations to get feedback from their employees.

Social feedback in SharePoint

Although SharePoint 2007 contained some functionality that you could consider as basic social feedback, it was the 2010 release that introduced concepts as comments and rating. In SharePoint 2013 those features are back and next to the ability to comment and rate content we can also like it.

Comparing to rating, where you have to think about whether the content is good or very good, liking is so much easier: you either like the content or not, period.

Liking content not only serves as feedback to its authors. In many organizations it’s also an important way for improving the discoverability of the content.

Liking content in SharePoint 2013

Because there are valid scenarios for using both ratings and likes, SharePoint 2013 offers us both capabilities. On a per-List basis you can choose which one you want to use. After enabling ‘Liking’ on your List, a new column called ‘Number of likes’ will be added to the List View.

Using this column you can see how many people have already liked the particular piece of content but you can also (un)like the content yourself.

This standard interface works great with Documents and List Items, but what if you wanted to allow your users to like Publishing Pages as well?

Liking Publishing Pages: not so great out of the box

Usually, to allow users to interact with some content on a Publishing Page, you would drop that particular piece of content on the Page Layout. If you tried to do exactly that with the ‘Number of likes’ column, what you would get, wouldn’t be exactly what you would expect:

The only thing visible on the page is the number of likes. The ability to like the page however is nowhere to be seen. So much for social feedback. There is however a better experience to think of, that offers you exactly what you want.

Liking Publishing Pages with Mavention Like This Page

Mavention Like This Page is a no-code Sandboxed Solution for SharePoint 2013 that allows your users to Like Publishing Pages.

After installation the Mavention Like This Page Site Collection Feature is automatically activated. The only thing left for you to do is to put the following code snippet on your page where you want the Like control to appear:

<div id="mvLikeThisPage"></div>

The next time you load your page, instead of seeing the number of likes, you will see the standard SharePoint 2013 Like control that will allow your users both to see how many other people have already liked the particular page, as well as Like that page themselves.

Summary

SharePoint 2013 offers the ability to like content. By default this capability is limited to List Views which makes it useful for use with Documents and List Items, but inconvenient to use with Publishing Pages. Using the Mavention Like This Page Solution it’s possible to add the standard SharePoint 2013 ‘Like’ control directly on the page.

Download: Mavention Like This Page (2KB, WSP)