Settings Explained Part 1.

Plugin has so many settings that I understand that sometimes it can be difficult to see what each of the settings is exactly doing. So, this is the first post in which I will try to explain all settings. Most of the settings are self explanatory. Since the settings panel have a lot of tabs,  this first part will cover first 4 tabs.

Settings Tabs

Features Tab

1. Features

First tab displays general plugin features. They are divided into several sections. First section are voting related features. AJAX setting will be removed, because from 1.2.0 only AJAX will be available for saving votes. But the other option is for adding additional nonce security protection to the query string to prevent requests from outside your blog. Two more voting options are for banned IP’s.

Plugin Features section has some very important options. Link external javascript code option will put all javascript code needed by the plugin into external file instead embedding in into page. Second option is for linking additional rating.css file. After this there are 6 options for activating and deactivating major plugin features. Some of these features are disabled by default. Last two options in this sections are added recently. Static rating images can be generated using DIV tags or actually generating images. DIV static block can be a problem to include in every theme because of the DIV properties. In that case you need to use generated images. Also, second option is there to prevent access to this graphics generator from outside your blog.

Charset section only has one option for charset encoding that will be used for templates.This setting requires that your database uses same encoding so that plugin will be able to save the encoded data properly. Rating log section is for saving user agent used by the visitors with each vote. This can take a lot of space in the database, so you might wanna disable it. Second option is for saving cookies that are also used to prevent duplicated voting. Last section has two options that are used only by Internet Explorer browsers. Both of this settings are not full solutions, and they might not even work with every version of the IE browsers. First is transparency problem with IE6. To avoid this problem completely it’s better to use GIF images stars sets instead of PNG’s. Second problem is affecting all IE browsers, multi ratings use partial opacity that IE can’t display so this fix is for that.

Administration Tab

2. Administration

Options on this tab are affecting administration panels of the plugin. First two options are for controlling width and number of rows for grids rendered by the plugin. Settings section are options that will show or hide some parts of the settings tabs. Custom CSS settings controls visibility of the settings for CSS on all tabs that have them: posts, comments or multis. Placement settings control if the options for alignment of rating blocks and rating header text. Enable it if you want to add headers or to align the blocks. Third option controls visibility of default voting rules options. Last option in this section controls refreshing of the feed on the plugins front page. Panels section can be used to hide some of the plugins panels you don’t use.

Debug Tab

3. Debug

Plugin supports two debugging modes. One is small in-line text added to each rating block. I recommend leaving this option always active because in most cases this debug info can help solving most of the rating related problems. Second one requires access to debug text file and will add large amount of data to it including SQL queries, and is used for deeper analysis and tracking ‘real’ bugs. By default plugin uses debug.txt file in plugins folder, and this file must be writable. You can change this by changing the path to debug file in plugins config file.

Cache Tab

4. Cache

This options control internal cache used by the plugin to store rating images generated by the plugin for static display of ratings. Image generator uses PHP GD library and that can have big impact on the server performance. So, this generator can save each generated image for later reuse. Plugin will attempt to create all necessary folders, but if it fails, you will see the notice on this tab about the problem and also what you need to do to solve it so that the cache can be enabled. Generated images depend on the set used, number of stars and actual rating. Typical size of generated image is few KB. You can set if you want plugin to delete cached images by specifying the number of days between cleanups. I recommend using cache especially if you use integration of ratings into RSS feed (more on that in part 2).

I hope that you understand better settings on those tabs and what impact they can have on the plugin behaviour. In most cases you need to experiment to try all the options. In the next few dyas I will add 2 more posts about the plugin settings.

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