Interests & Personalized Onboarding

Updated

Included in Free - This feature is available in the free version of WPMediaVerse.

New members pick a handful of interests, get a ranked list of creators to follow, and see a feed that leans toward what they picked - instead of landing on an empty explore page with nobody to follow and nothing personalized to see.

What You Can Do

  • Choose interests from the site's existing media categories (mvs_category taxonomy) during first-session activation
  • See a ranked "people you may know" list, boosted toward creators who post in your chosen interests
  • Request an interest-aware media feed that favors your picks over a plain chronological/popular feed
  • Skip the picker entirely and mark onboarding done without choosing anything

How It Works

  1. On first login, a client shows the available interest chips - up to 40 of the site's most-used categories, each with a cover photo and post count
  2. The member taps the interests they care about and saves
  3. The site immediately has a ranked follow-suggestion list ready, weighted toward creators active in those interests
  4. Requesting the feed with the interest-aware flag on returns media favoring the member's saved interests first

Today this ships as a REST API surface (built for the official MediaVerse app and for headless/custom frontends) rather than a bundled on-page picker screen in the default web templates - any client that speaks REST can build the picker UI on top of it.

For Site Owners

Nothing to configure - interests reuse the categories you already use for tagging media (mvs_category), so there's no separate taxonomy to maintain. The candidate pool for follow suggestions and the public interest list are both cached (default 1 hour) so this stays cheap on busy sites.

REST API

Base URL: /wp-json/mvs/v1/

GET /app/interests

Public (no authentication). Returns the available interest chips, ranked by post count.

Response:

[
  { "id": 12, "name": "Landscape", "slug": "landscape", "count": 340, "cover_url": "https://yoursite.com/..." }
]

Up to 40 categories. Cache TTL is filterable via mvs_app_interests_cache_ttl (default 1 hour, seconds; 0 disables caching).

GET /me/interests

Requires a logged-in user. Returns the current user's saved interest IDs.

Response:

{ "interest_ids": [12, 45] }

POST /me/interests

Requires a logged-in user. Save the member's interest picks.

Body:

{ "interest_ids": [12, 45] }

Only real mvs_category term IDs are kept; anything else is silently dropped. Saving also marks the member as onboarded (see below).

POST /me/onboarding/complete

Requires a logged-in user. Flags the viewer as onboarded without requiring them to pick any interests - the "skip" path.

Response:

{ "onboarded": true }

The onboarded flag is also surfaced on the member's own profile response so a client only shows the activation flow once.

GET /users/suggested

Requires a logged-in user (anonymous requests fall back to pure popularity ranking). Returns "people you may know" - creators ranked by follower count, boosted toward creators posting in the viewer's saved interests, excluding the viewer, anyone already followed, and anyone blocked.

Parameters:

Parameter Type Default Description
limit int 20 Maximum suggestions (1-50)

Candidate pool cache TTL is filterable via mvs_suggestions_cache_ttl (default 1 hour, seconds; 0 disables caching).

Interest-aware media feed

Pass interests=auto on the media listing endpoint (GET /mvs/v1/media) to narrow results toward the logged-in viewer's saved interest categories. Requires a logged-in user with at least one saved interest; anonymous viewers and members with no saved interests are unaffected (the feed never comes back empty because of this parameter).

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