Gamification Overview

Requires WPMediaVerse Pro - This feature is available exclusively in the Pro version.

WPMediaVerse Gamification turns your media community into a competitive platform. Users earn XP, enter photo competitions, challenge each other to battles, and boost their media visibility - all integrated with the wb-gamification plugin's XP and reward engine.

Gamification requires WPMediaVerse Pro and the wb-gamification plugin (active and configured). All gamification features are disabled by default. Enable each feature individually at WPMediaVerse > Settings > Gamification.

Requirements

• WPMediaVerse Pro 1.0.0+
• wb-gamification plugin (active)
• WordPress 6.5+
• PHP 7.4+

Feature Types

Feature	Description	Setting Key
Photo Challenges	Themed weekly competitions with voting	mvs_challenges_enabled
Photo Battles	1v1 head-to-head media matchups	mvs_battles_enabled
Tournaments	Single-elimination bracket competitions	mvs_tournaments_enabled
Media Boosts	Spend points to increase media visibility	mvs_boosts_enabled
Upload Streaks	Track consecutive daily uploads	mvs_streaks_enabled

Competition Types

All three competition types share a unified database schema. Each type follows its own lifecycle, but they share the same tables.

Challenges

Themed weekly competitions. Admin creates a challenge with a theme, entry window, and voting window. Users submit a photo, community votes, winners earn XP prizes.

Battles

1v1 matchups. A challenger picks a photo and invites an opponent. Both submit photos, the community votes, the system resolves the winner.

Tournaments

Single-elimination brackets for 4 to 64 participants. Users register, the system seeds the bracket, rounds proceed by community vote until a winner is determined.

Database Schema

Table	Purpose
mvs_competitions	Master record for all challenges, battles, and tournaments
mvs_competition_entries	User photo submissions for any competition type
mvs_competition_matches	Individual head-to-head pairings (battles and tournament rounds)
mvs_competition_votes	Per-user votes on entries or matches
mvs_boosts	Active and expired media boost records

The mvs_competitions.type column distinguishes between challenge, battle, and tournament records.

XP Integration

XP and points are not awarded by WPMediaVerse itself - the separate free wb-gamification plugin is the points engine. WPMediaVerse ships an integration manifest that registers 15 gamification actions (photo upload, album creation, likes/comments/follows/favorites received and given, bookmarks, battle win, challenge participation, challenge placing, tournament round win, tournament win, and streak milestones).

As members interact with the site and competitions, WPMediaVerse fires the matching action hooks - for example mvs_media_uploaded, mvs_battle_resolved, mvs_challenge_winner_named, mvs_tournament_finalized, and mvs_streak_milestone - and wb-gamification awards the points configured for each action. The per-competition XP prizes you set on a challenge or tournament are honored through the wb_gam_points_for_action filter, so the points a member earns match the prize shown in the UI.

Without the wb-gamification plugin active, competitions still run end to end - members enter, vote, and win - but no points are earned or spent. Install and activate wb-gamification to enable the XP and rewards layer.

Frontend Pages

URL	Description
/media/challenges/	Browse and enter photo challenges
/media/battles/	View active and completed battles
/media/tournaments/	Browse tournaments and view brackets
/compete/	Unified competition hub showing all active competitions

The My Media dashboard adds Challenges, Battles, and Tournaments tabs showing the logged-in user's entries, results, and active matches.

Scheduled Actions

All competition lifecycle transitions run via Action Scheduler on an hourly recurrence. No competition state changes happen in real time - transitions occur at the next hourly tick after a deadline passes.

Scheduled Action	Trigger Condition
mvs_activate_scheduled_challenges	Challenge start date reached
mvs_close_challenge_entries	Entry deadline reached
mvs_finalize_expired_challenges	Voting deadline reached
mvs_resolve_expired_battles	Battle vote deadline reached
mvs_start_registered_tournaments	Tournament registration deadline reached
mvs_resolve_expired_matches	Match vote deadline reached
mvs_expire_boosts	Boost impression target or duration reached
mvs_daily_streak_check	Daily at 2 AM - break streaks for missed uploads

Action Scheduler must be running for gamification to function. If you use a managed host that blocks WP-Cron, configure Action Scheduler with a server-level cron trigger.