I decided to release plugin little earlier then I first announced it. Plugin has come a long way, and is almost ready for a stable 1.0.0. There are few very importan thing missing, and in the next few weeks, all that will be done. As you could see in the previous post, GD Star Rating has brand new widget.

Widget support multiple instances, so you can add more than one widget with different ratings into your sidebar. And widget alows you full control of the rendering using templates. This is also a preview of template system that the plugin will use for rating stars block, rating tables and everything else.

Continue to see what else is new, or just download plugin and see for your self.

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Here is the new version of rating plugin. Since I have completed all work I have planned on my Starscape theme, I will have more time for this plugin. And this new version adds few new things, introduces many changes and bug fixes.

Since this is still far from final stable release, database handling code is still not completed, and right now there are many uneeded calls made to the database when it comes to comments rating. Also, I had to change some things in database layout, and I have added upgrade code, so this should be working ok. In any case, after you upgrade, please check if the votes are recorded properly, and report any errors you find with that. I have tested upgrading on few test blog, and there were no problems.

And as always, mind that this is still in development, and is not recommended to use it on your production blog.

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New version is ready. This one will hopefully fix duplicate voting, header sent error message and few other small errors. I have tested it last two days on different blogs, with WordPress 2.5.1 and WordPress 2.6, and so far I couldn’t find any problem. If you still getting errors, please report it in the forum and add exact error you get along with version of WordPress you are using.

This version has working widget. There is still work to be done, but for now widget supports multiple instances, and you can add as many differently set rating widgets in sidebars as you want. For now you will have a list with rating displayed.

Also, shortcode support is expanded, new options are added into TinyMCE3 plugin settings and now you can have rating displayed with stars. You can see the example on the screenshot on the right.

Next version will be availbe in the next few days with some changes to widget and control panel.

Since I have started developing my ‘GD Pages Navigator’ widget plugin, I wanted to upgrade it so it can support more then one instance on a page. Unfortunatly there are limited resources available for that task, and almost no info about it in the official documentation. There are plugins that use different methods of achiving this, but best method is the one used by plugins build into Wordpress.

So, my starting point was ‘widget.php’ file where this default widgets are located. They also provided a short example of multi instance widget at the end of this file. This example in is good, but it has few errors (copy-paste errors mostly). This function is in the sample code class

I have decided to walk you throught the process of creating a widget that will support more then one instance. This example will show you how to work with different types of settings and it will provide you with some practicle code snippets you can use in your own plugins. Tutorial will be based on my ‘GD Pages Navigator’ plugin. This widget supports multiple instances from the version 3.0.0.
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