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Ratings Module

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Ratings Module

The Ratings Module allows you to give your users a voice about the listings on your site. They can rate and comment on the listings, search by ratings and use the ratings to decide which businesses are the ones they’re looking for.

You get the ability to require comments with ratings (or not), and to define a threshold to display ratings information on list views and single views.

Installation

The files you download are in a ZIP that is a full plugin. The installation instructions are inside of it, and here as well:

Upload the ZIP as a plugin via the MANUAL process*. From the WordPress admin panel

  • Go to Plugins->Add New,
  • Click on the “Upload” link, and then click on Browse Now to locate the ZIP file you just downloaded.
  • Click OK once you find it on your local computer
  • Click the Install Now button to start the process.
  • After the installation completes, click the “Activate Plugin” link to turn on the module

*NOTE: If you are using a Mac, the file may be automatically unzipped when you download it. You can change the default setting in Safari to only download the ZIP file and not unpack it. To do this: 1. Open Safari, 2. Click Preferences, 3. Under the General tab, uncheck the option Open “safe” files after downloading

Administration

The ratings administration screen is broken into 3 separate parts.  The top relates to general settings around Ratings:

The settings are as follows:

Enable ratings: This activates the Ratings module and displays the ratings per the current settings. If you wish to temporarily disable ratings, you can uncheck this box and users will not be able to rate listings.

Ratings threshold: This is the minimum number of ratings that must be recorded before the “Ratings (average)” will display a star value. Default value is 0 (which displays all ratings immediately).

Allow unregistered users to post reviews?: This allows users who haven’t logged in to post a rating. The default is that a user must be registered and logged in to rate a listing. The user’s IP address is recorded to prevent multiple ratings from a single user.

Allow some HTML in the Rating comments?: This allows users to post reviews with some basic formatting HTML tags (bold, italic, pre, etc) without risking full HTML exposure to unsafe tags like iframe or scripting.

Rating Comments: Three options to choose from:  Required, Optional, or Disabled.  Required means that a user must enter a comment with their rating.  Optional is the opposite.  Disabled means the comment form is hidden from the user altogether.

Admin must approve reviews?: Turning this option on requires that the admin must see and approve all ratings before they are displayed on the listing. Useful when you have spammers attacking your site.

The second part relates to email settings with Ratings:

These settings are as follows:

Notify Listing owner of new ratings?:  If active, the owner of the listing will be emailed after a rating is posted and approved by admin (if rating approvals are on).  Otherwise, the listing owner will not be notified of any ratings made.  The email template used for this notification is set under New Rating Posted email message below.

Notify site admin of approved/submitted ratings?:  If active, sends email to the admin when ratings have been submitted or awaiting approval for any listing.

New Rating Posted email message:  This is the email template that is sent to the listing owner when the Notify Listing owner of new ratings is active.  You can customize the text by clicking on the black button “Click to edit”.

Rating pending approval email message: This is the email template that is sent to the admin when the Notify site admin of approved/submitted ratings is active.  You can customize the text by clicking on the black button “Click to edit”.

Lastly, you can alter the tooltips that appear over the average rating with your mouse.  These are in the bottom section of the Ratings admin tab:

If you don’t want tooltips to appear, just delete the text in each of these fields and save settings.  Otherwise, change the text to be whatever you like.

Here are some screenshots of the ratings module in action. First, the list-based (excerpt) view, with the average displayed:

And here is the rating at the top on the single listing display:

 

And after ratings have been submitted:

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