Ratings Short-tags Plugin for Wordpress
If you review books and movies, you’ll want to provide a rating. Usual movie ratings consist of 1-5 or 1-6 stars, zero stars reserved mainly for Uwe Boll movies.
This plugin let’s you do just that. Simply write
[rating=5]
and you’ll get this:
There’s an options page which allows you to configure the rating symbol (another popular one is the ★), the symbol color, the empty symbol color and lastly how many stars you can give away at the most.
Download
Syntax
The following shorttags (or shortcodes) are available:
[rating=5] [rating stars="5" /]
Other Notes
Questions have been asked why the default option outputs 6-star ratings. First of all, this is an option you can change if you prefer 5 star ratings (or even 3 or 20 star ratings). The reason for 6 being default is that this requires the reviewer to decide whether a movie is mediocre-good (4 stars) or mediocre-bad (3 stars). This is more useful than a 3/5 rating, because that’s the exact middle.
Replacing The Symbols With Images
Ratings Short-tags already supports using images instead of unicode symbols to show ratings. You just need to use a little CSS to get it going. Here’s an example:
.rating span { /* both full and empty symbols */ display: block; width: 20px; height: 20px; float: left; text-indent: -9999px; background: url('url/to/fullstar.gif') no-repeat left top; } .rating span.empty { /* overwrite empty symbols image value */ background: url('url/to/emptystar.gif') no-repeat left top; } .rating:after { content: "."; display: block; height: 0; clear: both; visibility: hidden; zoom: 1; /* triggers hasLayout */ }
Nice! I’ll definitely try it out. :)
cool plug-in Joen!
what about an option (tag) to list all review’s on a page?
Thanks.
Personally I tag all my reviews with the reviews tag and that works fine. I think anything else would be overkill :)
If integrated, you could list by rating.
Oooh, I get it, that’s very nice!
Hmmmmmm.
I’ll put that on the ToDoWhenIGetGoodEnough list. Unless someone else picks up this, (it’s open source, after all), and builds it in…
This plugin has been updated to not show “empty” stars in feed viewers. The “empty” is done using CSS, which obviously doesn’t translate to feeds, so…
Great plugin :)
I’m afraid everything gets 6 stars in our feed (via Feedburner). We’re using version 1.5 of the plugin. Any ideas?
That’s odd… do you have the latest version of Wordpress? I’m checking if the thing is being shown in the XML, and not outputting those “blank” stars when that happens… What’s your URL?
Running Wordpress MU, latest version. Http://horsensbibliotek.dk (I’m standing in for Morten, whom you talked to earlier, I believe)
I’m looking at this URL now:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/HorsensKommunesBiblioteker
and I do see those 6 stars being output.
I have no idea why, but I’m going to send you a modified version now, which doesn’t output the “empty stars”. This is a hack, and only until I manage to upgrade the version once I identify the problem.
Awesome. Thank you very much :)
In the above paragraph you explain that there is an options page to alter the symbol. Where is said options page?
Here:
http://noscope.com/photostream/various/ratings.jpg/view
Are you not getting that page?
No, could be that I am using a newer version of Wordpress?
No, this should work with versions 2.5 to 2.8. I’m using 2.7.1.
Try redownloading and reactivating the plugin.
Do the shortcodes work? Does anything appear if you write [rating stars="5"] ?
The shortcodes do work, I will try reactivating it.
Okay, I reactivated it and it’s now there, still a bit unsure as to how that allows me to change the image. I will mess with it for now, thanks a ton for the help!
It’s important to note that right now the plugin doesn’t support using images. It is in fact using Unicode symbols, i.e. text.
lol, ya I guess I should have noticed that from the start. What I mean is there a place to find a compiled list of unicodes? I am looking for (I know this sounds silly) a spoon.
There are a few here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Symbols
What you’re looking for are the HTML counterparts, i.e.
⚲for ⚲ (which was the closest to a spoon I found).It hits me that there is support for images, as long as you use CSS to do it!
Edit: Added the CSS to the post instead.
Awesome!
Thank you, you’ve been more than helpful. Very impressed with how fast you replied to all my questions and I really like this plug-in.
I cant seem to get the images working, after i placed the CSS code in the stylesheets do I need to make any changes to the settings of the plugin?
The CSS was off the top of my head. Do you have a link I can look at?
Is there a way to show the ratings on the post title; especially on the main page?
As such, the intention of the plugin so far has only been to provide the shortcodes ([rating stars="x"]). Shortcodes only work in the body of your posts.
However, there’s been some interest in a small rewrite which would feature the ability to list, for instance, all 5 star reviews. That would mean storing the rating in the database somewhere. If I had the rating stored there, there’s no reason I couldn’t output it in the title, as an option.
So yes, it’s possible.
One important thing, however, this is just speculation and I’m truly and honestly too busy to work on this for the next foreseeable future. If, however, someone takes interest in this plugin and would like to take it upon themselves to build it in soon, I’d love to give SVN access (it’s all open source here).
Works great, thank you
Love this!! very helpful!!
but is there any way to remove HTML code “p”?
I mean… I only need the “span” tag, like this
http://www.flickr.com/photos/santinaki/3500800427/
and I use this plugin here
http://san-tin.com/iphone/2009/05/big-diary-and-notes/
sorry for my poor English…
Yes, you can remove the extra P tag. You just have to edit the plugin, and remove wpautop from line 48 in the ratings-shorttags.php file. Note, it says wpautop($something) and you should remove the wpautop( and ), but not the variable in between.
It works.
Thank you very much!
_
thanks for this great plugin!
is there any way to show fractions/parts of a symbol?
i.e. If I rate a movie 4.5 stars out of 5, is there a way to do that with this plugin?
also, is there a way to enlarge the symbol output size?
thanks
No, I’m afraid not. But you could set the maximum stars to 10, and show 9/10 stars. But I don’t think that’s what you’re after.
Yes, using CSS:
thanks for your prompt reply. i might just have to switch to a 10 star rating since this plugin is so useful.
on a random note, i’m having a tough time updating my comments page (my theme is really old and has been modified piecemeal for a few WP releases now) for 2.7 nesting, etc…any chance you could share (via email or wherever) your comments code (comments.php and accompanying css)? its very clean and well done.
thanks again
These days, I’m close to releasing my upcoming Pangea theme for Wordpress. http://noscope.com/pangea/
It’s basically the same code, though the CSS is a bit different. So stay tuned :)
noob question. any idea how i can get the rating symbol to align vertically with my preceding text?
here’s an example of usage – http://www.boilr.net/2009/06/06/update-linksys-wrt54g2-router-works-like-a-champ/
thanks again for the great plugin and prompt support
nevermind, i’ve decided to remove the preceding text.
Nice plugin. I’m trying it out already.
Shorttags do work fine, but unfortunately my co-bloggers are not that IT-savvy and not very much into anything that looks like just the tiniest bit of code. They could really use something wysiwyg.
Is there any chance that you could make at button in the TinyMCE toolbar, which makes it easy to insert the rating/the shorttag?
For example, see Vipers Video Quicktags for reference/inspiration. I know it’s a more complicated plugin but Viper007Bond managed to do something like that.
Anyway, thanks for a nice plugin. Keep up the good work.
Yes, I actually could do that. I’m adding this to the list. Good suggestion.
The code for images should be like this
you need the “float: left;” to have your stars from left to right ;)
Oh, right, good point. Then you probably also need a clearfix, like this:
Hi there! Great plugin, I love it.
I saw you mentioned this only works in the BODY of a post, but how would I be able to get it to work using custom fields, so I could automatically insert numbers into it? Could I place it in a template tag somewhere or modify an existing template to show after a post? Please email me if this is too complicated.
Thanks!
Hi,
You need to look into “do_shortcode”:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/do_shortcode
I’m sorry I can’t be more indepth than this. But I’m sure running shortcodes on widgets is elaborated in the Wordpress forum.