Just a quick post about current development of GD Star Rating. I have been adding new things, but mostly I am focused on fixing reported bugs. And good news is that most of the reported bugs are fixed! Just to mention some of the most important:

1. invalid rendering postion for StarRater shortcode
2. XHTML validity problems
3. crashing WordPress rendering in some rare cases
4. invalid template initialization

If you have found more bugs, please report them in comments or on the forum. And if you want to test latest development snapshot, go to Google Code Project Page and get it from SVN or from Download page (0.9.9 Dev).

On monday I will release GD Star Rating 0.9.9 Release Candidate. And most likely for Halloween stable 1.0.0 will be released.

Another day and the next release is ready. New in this version is introduction of import data panel where you can find tabs for importing recorded data from other rating plugins. This version has import from Post Star Rating plugin, and the next will have import from WP-PostRatings. I have tested the import, and it should be working ok, but again it’s possible that some bugs are still there, because I have tested this only with last official plugin version. Import is designed to imoprt data only once, but there is a reset button for all imports. I will add test that will determine if the plugin is already used, but that’s for the next version.

Also, there are new trend icons added from FamFamFam and Crystal icon sets. Setup page is expanded and now contains descriptions for each function. Few bugs are fixed, most important is very nasty bug with trend display in the widget.

If everything goes OK, by the end of the week, last pre-1.0.0 version will be released, some sort of Release Candidate. It will have redesigned StarRater shortcode, unified ratings rendering and few onther improvements. And then, 1.0.0 is just days away.

And here is another release of the plugin. And there are more new features in this one. The most important new features is trend calculation. Trends can be displayed only in widget right now, but for the next version I will rewrite StarRater shortcode and it will have all the features that are now build in widget and few more extra things. Plugin is compatible with latest WordPress 2.7 development version. But, since 2.7 version is changing a lot, some other problems can happen.

Trends can be displayd as a text or as a image. There are new sets of icons for this, and they can be customized like the stars. For now there is only one set available, but I will add more. There are a lot of fixes included, and I have tried to resolve problems reported so far. Unfortunalty some bugs I couldn’t recreate and therefore I couldn’t fix. Also, some bugs are related to upgrade problems from older versions, so usually problems are solved with database tables reinstall from Setup page.

Also, please be patient if you find some bugs, it’s still under development. Plugin is getting more and more complicated. Only database related code is over 1000 lines long, and bugs are still bound to appear. Also, I recommend using Google Code where you can find daily updated latest plugin version via SVN.

I have set up a project page on Google Code webiste for GD Star Rating plugin. This way we can now use built in wiki, issue tracker and subversion source code access.

To access GD Star Rating on Google Code, go to this url:

http://code.google.com/p/gd-star-rating/

Source code will be the latest trunk code for the plugin, and this can be considered development version. Everyone can download it from there and use it to preview the planned release. All the latest changes will be on the Google Code SVN.

I will try to update wiki pages to have a list of planned features, roadmap and anything else that can be useful.

Also, there is an issue tracker and I reccommend using it to report bugs and other issues with the plugin. I will check Google Code page as often as I can, and I will also get email notifications, so I will respond to bug reports faster.

Unfortunatly, I didn’t have much free time last 2 weeks, and that’s the reason for no new version of GD Star Rating plugin. After 0.9.5 version, I was very, very busy with my job. Good news is, that I will be back working on Rating plugin in the next 4 or 5 days, and you can expect new version sometime next week.