Benchmark #1: Admin
GD Star Rating is one of the biggest plugin currently available for WordPress. And some users were concerned about impact of this plugin to website performance. So, I decided to benchmark GD Star Rating in last 3 major versions of WordPress.
GD Star Rating 1.4.8
Few more bugs were reported in the last couple of days, and I find some myself, so I decided to release another version before 1.5.0. Also, I did a major cleanup of the HTML and JavaScript code used on admin pages. And added few more things.
GD Press Tools 1.4.7
During the last few days after 1.4.6 is released, several bugs, mostly minor were reported. So, I decided to release new version with all reported bugs fixed, rather to wait for 1.5.0 that’s coming next week. So, here is another minor version.
The Road Ahead
With GD Star Rating 1.5.0 week away, this post will outline the features this plugin will get in the future. Most of the things I wanted do do is already done, but still there are many things that you can expect. List of features is split into two parts.
Categories management
One of the new things in GD Star Rating 1.4.6 is functions Categories panel for categories based management of rules, restrictions and integration. Categories hierarchy is fully supported, and settings can be inherited from parent categories.
Optimization Guide #2
After you have set JavaScript and CSS settings according to my recommendations from the first optimization post, now is the time to look at some other settings. So, here are AJAX, cache, static image generation and few other settings.
The Road Behind
Exactly a year ago (give or take a week) I started working on a ‘simple’ rating plugin for a friends blog. And now that the GD Star Rating 1.5.0 is a week away, here is the road from that simple idea to one of the most advanced plugins available.
GD Star Rating 1.4.6
GD Star Rating 1.4.6 is released. This release is mainly intended for bug fixing, but there are some new things also. This release is most likely last one in 1.4.x line. And GD Star Rating 1.5.0 will be released next week. Before that lets focus on this one.
Optimization Guide #1
I know, GD Star Rating has a lot (or maybe too many) settings. But that’s what it takes to make a plugin that can be customized to the extent this plugins does. But, all that will require some tweaking and optimizations for better performance.
GD Star Rating 1.4.5
I am sorry for the bug that managed to sneak into the code in the previous version. Bug only affected those that tried to install plugin for the first time. Problem was with installing default templates, so the rendering failed without them.
