I have made a lot of changes in the plugin, and most of the things are fully rewritten. Last two weeks I got a lot of emails, and there were also few forum posts with feature requests and suggestions, so I have decided to compile a list of things that needs to be done. And that’s the reason for so much changes from previous release version.

I did some experimenting on the way to render stars better so it will work in every theme with every browser. There could still be some problems with some themes, so if you find such a problem or even better a solution, please leave a post in the forum.

Also, note that this is still in development and NOT stable version so I don’t recommend to use it on the production blog. Many of the features are not finished, and in the next 2-3 weeks I expect to have stable 1.0.0 version. So, test this one, report bugs and help me to create the best rating plugin for WordPress. And if you are curious about what’s new continue reading this post.

Control Panel

Since I wanted to add many new things, I have decided to create top level administration menu. New control panel has 7 pages: settings, post/page votes, comment votes, moderation, log, setup and front page. Visualy all pages look like WordPress so it will be easier to use it.

Database

Plugin now uses 5 tables in the database to store a lot more info. Now plugin can hold data about voting trends on the daily level, comment voting, detailed log of votes and other things. If you want, you can convert data from old version of plugin into new one. Check out Setup page for this. After the comversion you can delete old tables.

Settings page is much different now. Better check it out for yourselves, I hope you like it.

Voting & Review Rating

Plugin will save votes separatly for visitors and logged users. Also, there is new rating category called Review Rating. This is rating of the post added by the post writer, and it can be modified through plugin control panel or directly for each post on the WordPress post edit page. New panel is added to the edit page sidebar and this panel will be expanded later.

Addition to the post edit page

I have added voting rules and moderation. Voting rules are post based, and you can allow vote to everyone, only to visitors or only to users, you can lock voting or even hide rating stars for post. Moderation is still in works, but the idea is not to use votes until the vote is approved. This is also on post basis. Based on the voting rules, rating stars will be display to the user/visitor and the voting will be allowed or forbidden to them according to set rules. All these can be set through Articles page in the control panel.

Moderation and Review Rating can be turned off if you don’t need them. Check the Settings page.

Comment voting is still in works and will be available in 0.9.0.

Shortcodes

Existing shortcode for voting results tabel is expanded with new fields and with selection of the category. Also, two new shortcodes are added. One for showing Review Rating, and the other for rendering post rating stars. This way you don’t have to use automatic adding of rating stars by the plugin, but you can add rating stars wherever you want in the post.

Manual adding of rating

If you don’t like the location of the stars in the post added by plugin automaticly, and you don’t want to use shortcodes, you can use PHP functions to add rating code wherever you want. Note that this must be done inside the WordPress post/page loop.

User Guide

I have started working on the user guide, and there are only few things there, but expect full user guide soon.

And more…

Multi language support is in works and will have them completed soon. I am sure that there are some more new and improved things, but I am not sure right now exactly what I have missed. Give it a try and I hope you like the direction this plugin is going.