GD Star Rating Widget Options
This widget can be set do display list of posts with ratings and rating trends. Widget supports filtering, sorting and templates. And most importantly widget supports multiple instances, so you can add more than one of them in the sidebar with different settings.
Since there are a lot of options to set, it can happened that you get the empty list instead of list of ratings. I will go step by step through all the options this widget has.
1. Main Options
Title is obvious, it’s the title for the widget displayed on the blog. Than you set who will see the widget, and that defaults to everyone. You can show widget only to visitors or registered and logged in user or hide it completely.
Third option is very important and is called grouping. When is set to no grouping you will actually see the list of posts. But if you set to something else, list changes. If the grouping is set to user based, than you will see the list of users and you will see average rating for users based on all the posts that user wrote.
Category based grouping
If the grouping is set to category based, list will display categories and rating will be average rating for all the posts in the category. Picture on the right shows widget grouped by categories and ordered by category ID.
2. Trend
Plugin calculates voting and rating trends over the period of time. Trend can be up, down or equal. You can display trends as text or image. If you select text, you need to set characters for each trend value. Trend is calculated only if you add trend tag into template. Periods for calculating trend can be set on the Statistics tab of settings panel.
3. Filter
This is the most complex part of the widget. First filtering is for the type of articles: post and/or pages. Also, select should widget display all votes, or only votes from users or visitors. Next is number of posts that should be displayed (10 is default), and after that is minimal number of votes the posts need to have to be included in the list. After that, set the sorting of items, column and order.
If Bayesian minimum votes required is checked, only posts with minimum number of votes set on Statistics settings tab. Also, you can hide articles with no votes or articles with no review rating set. After that you have category filter, and only posts from that category will be used. Last filter is for publishing date of the articles. There are three types of  date filtering: Last number of days, month of the publishing or date range. Date range needs to be in the format specified.
Be careful with filter settings, because you can easily can end up with widget that displays nothing. Key is to experiment and see what different settings will do.
4. Template
Template has 3 elements. First is the header, part rendered at the widget top. Second is actual template used for each item that will be rendered. Third one is footer template rendered at the end of widget. Item element is the only one that supports custom tag template elements. Default template shows UL / LI list. You can see the list of tags bellow the template elements, and for each tag you can see short description.
Conclusion
If you set everything right you should see a widget with your posts. There are few things that will be added soon, and I will update this tutorial after every change. Widget can’t display image of with stars and all template elements are saved only as UTF-8. Very soon this will be changed along with few other things.
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Does the widget have the ability to work with the multi rating function – so it will display the multi ratings?
Thanks
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Not yet. I still work on the functions for handling multi rating data.
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great plugin! I plan to use it for a rating portal.
I have got a question: via wigdet I’m able to put the Top10 of posts for a special category on my sidebar. That’s ok. But is there also a possibility to put a top rated list on a page ? For one special category and a special limit of posts (in this case 100). I just found the shortcodes for showing a ratingbox but not for some lists like in the widget. Perhaps I just overlooked it ?
BTW: I tried posting to the forums and get:
SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]
Field ‘post_edit_reason’ doesn’t have a default value [1364]
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The exactly the same thing can be done with widget and shortcode. Check out the shortcode via star button on the post editor, you will have the same options as for the widget. Check out the user guide for details.
I am going crazy with the forum, since the last update I just have problem after problem. Hopefully, I will resolve all that today.
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Great! I just did not see that “Advanced: StarRating” has the same options as the widget has. Now I can start to setup my portal and test your plugin.
Thanks!
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Hello Milan,
congratulations to this mighty plugin!
While testing the widget I came across a couple of items I want to give feedback on and maybe suggest future functionality:
1.) It would be great if you could set the widget to appear only in certain categories (and their children cats).
2.) The category filter allows you to only pick one category to display rated posts from. Here also an option to include children and / or more than one category would be useful.
3.) The comment rating is an awesome feature – I once came across a non-wp comment rating system that allowed only to mark a comment as positive or negative. Based on these ratings, the worst rated comments were blocked from view (with an option to show them nonetheless), which in my opinion tremendeously helped boil the content down to the high quality comments only – especially on comment-heavy posts…
I’m not sure how much work it would mean to modify your existing comment rating system to do someting similar but it seemed to me that it actually already is quite close already.
I think this feature alone could change the way bloggers (and readers) see the comment system of WP.
Hope this doesn’t sound like I want to give you extra work but this just went through my mind when I was testing…
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Thanks!.
1/2. Good suggestion. I will try to add more category based options. Some things I have already started working on.
3. I plan to add up/down (+/-) rating. This is planned for 1.3.0 release. Suggestion about blocking comments based on the rating is great. Something similar can be done with users posting negative rated comments.
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if your theme isn’t widget ready is there a PHP code to ad the top rated post widget?
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Again: user guide.
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