Biden’s Promises · Civic & politics
Biden’s Promises
A public promise tracker built in under a month: post-first submissions, source-backed ratings and a moderator who approves every status change.
Biden’s Promises was an independent project that listed Joe Biden’s campaign promises and let the public judge, with sources, whether each one had been kept. The site is no longer online; this case study describes it as we delivered it.
The brief
The site had to take promises from the public, hold them for a check before publishing, and let visitors rate each promise as Not fulfilled, Somewhat or Fulfilled, but only with sources attached. Every rating had to be seen by a moderator before a promise’s status could change.
Our approach
We planned and built the whole site solo in under a month, combining Elementor for the page design, ACF for the data and Gravity Forms for every public form, joined together with custom PHP.
What we built
Post first, register after
Visitors pass a captcha and write their promise, a title and its background, straight away; they are asked to register only after posting, so contributing takes less effort. New promises wait for approval and start with the status Not fulfilled.
Ratings that need sources
On each promise, visitors choose a verdict and add one or more source links, as many as they need. Every review emails the admin.
Moderation built on hooks
Gravity Forms hooks create the promise posts and write into their ACF fields. A submitted review proposes a status, and the moderator approves or rejects it after checking the sources.
Lists and pages from shortcodes
Custom shortcodes power the home page list of promises, the filters by status, and the parts of each promise page: its sources, reviews and status.
The result
The moderation flow handled hundreds of promises and source-backed reviews, with every status change checked by a person.
Built with
- WordPress and Elementor
- ACF
- Gravity Forms and its hooks
- Custom shortcodes
- PHP, JavaScript and CSS