Three days delay really paid off and I managed to find and fix few more bugs, and also to add some features planned for one of the next releases. Right now, more then 90% of all reported bugs are now fixed. There are two bugs that only occured in Firefox 3.0.4 preventing the vote to be sent. I am not sure why Firefox is causing this problem (and only with this version), but I will try to solve that one also, if it keeps repeating after this update.

Biggest bug was with the comments rating andblogs allowing anonymous comments, plugin treated all visitors like the comment authors, preventing them from voting. Rating text positioning and hiding is now fixed. Default widget template is updated, and widget and shortcode rendering in case with no votes found and trend options active. There was a small problem with PHP4 and scan_dir function that is also fixed. There ar a lot of small fixes all over the administration panels.

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Finally, after 4 months of development first stable release of WordPress rating plugin with tons of features and options. Plugin features post, page and comments rating, rating rules, moderation, time restricted voting, trend calculations, detailed voting log, import and export of votes, customizable images fro stars and trends, extensive control panel, PDF user guide and more.

This version has numerous bug fixes and few changes from previous RC4 version. I have added voters log where you can see who voted for what and where you can delete votes. Also, time restricted voting is completed but this feature might need some more testing, so I expect the feedback and bug reports.

You can expect regular updates and new features in the future. Roadmap is updated so you can check out what to expect soon. So, install fresh or upgrade plugin and try out new version.
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The first development cycle is almost over. This release candidate introduce few new features, and announces some more changes that will be available in 1.0.0 stable release. At this point I had no time to update documentation, so if you are confused by some of the (new) options, please visit a forum and ask whatever you need to know.

I will try to go through all changes made for this release, and beleive me, the list is very extensive. For full changelog, you can check Google Code plugin page.

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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.