This plugin adds a Likes Report option to the Tools menu. Use the report to download a file, which you can open in a spreadsheet, listing the content that staff have liked, with the number of likes, most liked first.
Use this report to find your most popular news stories and blog posts, to see what kind of content staff respond to, and to see who has been thanked most on your recognition wall.
Only administrators can use the report.
Switch on likes
The report has nothing to show until likes are switched on. Go to Options, then General, and open the Text and features tab.
- Enable likes shows a like button on content.
- Likes icon sets the button to a heart or a thumbs up.
- Likes post types sets which kinds of content have the button. News and Blog are chosen to begin with. You can add posts, news updates, events, team news, projects, tasks, vacancies and recognition wall entries.
Download the likes report
- Go to Tools, then Likes Report.
- Choose a Start date and an End date, or leave both blank for all liked content.
- Select Download likes report.
Your browser downloads a file. The file name says which period the report covers, followed by the date and time you ran it, such as likes-report-published-2026-07-01-to-2026-09-30-20261001093000.csv. A report for all content is called likes-report-all-dates, followed by the date and time.
What the dates mean in the likes report
The dates are about when the content was published, not when it was liked. The intranet keeps a running total of likes for each item. It does not record the date of each like.
So a report for July to September lists the content published in July, August and September, with all the likes each item has received up to today. It does not tell you how many likes were given during those months.
This is different from the (Govintra) Comments report, where the dates are about when the comments were made.
- Both dates blank: all liked content.
- Start date and End date: content published from the start of the Start date to the end of the End date.
- Start date only: content published from the Start date up to today.
- End date only: content published up to the end of the End date.
If you enter the dates the wrong way round, the report swaps them.
What the likes report contains
The report has one row for each published item that has at least one like. Content with no likes is left out, and so is content that was liked and then unliked. The most liked content is at the top. Items with the same number of likes are in date order, newest first.
- Title: the title of the news story, blog post or other item.
- Published: the date and time the item was published.
- Count: the total number of likes the item has now.
- Type: the kind of content. See the list below.
- Mentioned: for recognition wall entries, the people and teams who were thanked. It is empty for other content.
- Link: the address of the item on your intranet.
If a title starts with an equals sign, a plus sign, a minus sign or an at sign, the report puts an apostrophe in front of it. This stops a spreadsheet treating the title as a formula.
The Mentioned column and your recognition wall
On a recognition wall, such as the Wonderwall, each entry thanks one or more people or teams. The Mentioned column lists them, people first and then teams, separated by commas.
If someone who was thanked has since left and their account has been removed, the report cannot show their name. It shows (no longer on the intranet) instead, so that you can tell the difference between an entry about someone who has left and an entry that names nobody. The same words appear for a team that has been deleted. The name is usually still in the Title column, because the title of a wall entry is made from the names of the people thanked at the time.
To see who has been thanked most, filter the Type column to wall-entry and make a pivot table on the Mentioned column. An entry that thanks several people lists them together in one cell.
What the Type column means
The Type column uses the internal name of each kind of content.
- news: news stories
- news-update: news updates
- blog: blog posts
- team_news: team news
- wall-entry: entries on your recognition wall
- event: events
- project: projects
- task: tasks and guides
- vacancy: vacancies
- post: standard WordPress posts, if your intranet uses them
You may see other names if your intranet has extra kinds of content.
How likes are counted
- When staff log in to the intranet, each person can like an item once. Selecting the like button again takes their like back, and the count goes down by one.
- On an intranet where staff do not log in, the person’s browser remembers that they liked the item. The same person could like the item again from a different browser or device, so treat the counts as a guide to what is popular, not an exact number of people.
- The report shows how many likes an item has. It does not show who liked it.
Open the likes report in a spreadsheet
The columns in the file are separated by tabs. Numbers on a Mac and Google Sheets usually open the file in columns straight away.
If Excel shows everything in one column, select that column, choose Data, then Text to Columns, choose Delimited, tick Tab and select Finish. You can also open a blank workbook and use Data, then From Text/CSV, and choose Tab as the delimiter.
Ideas for using the likes report
- Your most liked content is at the top. Look at what those items have in common, such as the subject, the author, the headline or the image, when you plan future content.
- Newer content has had less time to collect likes. To compare fairly, run the report for one quarter at a time and compare items published in the same quarter.
- Make a pivot table on Type to compare the likes for news, blog posts and your recognition wall.
- Put the report beside the comments report. Content that is liked but not discussed, or discussed but not liked, tells you something different from content that is both.
What the likes report does not include
- Who liked each item, or when.
- Content with no likes, and content that is not published.
- Comments. Use the (Govintra) Comments report for those.
- Page views. Use your analytics for those.