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.
More than a year ago, my friend Vasa (Peexon Design) asked me if I know some easy to use rating plugin for WordPress to use on a blog he was working on. But, I coulnd’ recommend any of the available plugins, because not a single one was what he needed. The only decent plugin at the time was Lester Chen’s WP-Post Ratings.
Rating & Review
At first, plugin had only post and page rating support. But, 0.8.x branch introduced comments rating. The same branch added another new feature: post author review rating. Post editor widget was added along the shortcode to insert the review into the post.
Version 1.1.0 added another new type of rating: multi set rating. Multi ratings are also used for author reviews, so new shortcodes were added, new post edit box integration. For each type of rating, user can set rules for voting, moderation, time restricion. All votes are logged, trends calculated.
Rating CSS
So I started looking for a rating done using CSS only that can be easily modified to support different number of stars and customizable graphics.  And after a while I have found Ryan Masuga’s Unobtusive AJAX Rating Bars. First versions of the plugin used almost unchanged code from rating bars, but there were some problems with different themes, different browser so I changed code a bit over time.
Once I started adding different types of ratings, Ryan code wasn’t enough anymore. So, the plugin got first version of dynamically generated CSS. CSS and JavaScript use was completely rewritten and expanded. And that remained mostly unchanged for quite some time. But, many users wanted more, so CSS evolved once more. From version 1.3.0, CSS is once again rewritten allowing different sets to be used as active on the same page.
Rendering
In the beginning rendering was very simple and without much customization features. Plugin supports shortcodes for rating block and for rating results. Also, from version 0.7.0 plugin got first widget for results. But as the number of features grow the rendering became a limiting factor. So, the whole rendering is replaced from version 1.2.0 with unique templates system called T2. Everything from rating blocks to results and widgets is controlled with T2 templates.
Administration
From a simple settings panel in first alpha version plugin now has almost 20 administration panels. For posts, pages and comments management plugin has 4 panels hidden behind the Articles menu item. Settings panel has tons of settings in tabbed interface, Tools contain database cleanup, bulk operation, CSS editor and much more. Plugin also can import data from other rating plugins, can manage IP addresses and ban some of them if you want. And not to forget translation support, and several included translations to french, spanish and other languages.
And the list goes on and on, number of features is very, very long. If you want to see changes from version to version, detailed change log is included with the plugin. And most of the changes are here because you wanted them. Users feedback so far was amazing, and it really helped to make this plugin the way it is now.
And more is yet to come. New roadmap will be revealed soon outlining the road ahead.
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A very interesting journey, it is quite an achievement that you have kept working on it for a year but, more than that, you have created something that will, I believe, have a big impact on the Web once website owners become aware of what your work will allow them to do.
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Thanx for the support. There are already thousands of blogs that use GD Star Rating, and the number is growing. Also, WPMU/BoddyPress support is coming in a few months.
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I’m impresed with quality You put into GD Star Rating. Must be kept in mind that those little stars are powerfull marketing tool and in some cases main purchase decision driver. Keep up the good work!
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Small question: do you plan to improve the memory consumption? currently on my configuration GD Star rating takes around 8Mb. That’s a lot in compraison to WordPress alone (~16-20Mb). Do you think that some improvement can be done at this level?
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How did you determined that it uses 8MB? Plugin uses memory only on it’s own panels in admin, and when active on blog pages. And on blog pages it adds some 200-500KB depending on what rating is used. I will soon start series of posts on benchmarking, and one of the things that will be measured is this plugins.
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By doing a memory_get_usage. If I activate or deactive the GD star rating extension this is the difference of memory I get.
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Then there is someting very wrong. On admin pages once the plugin is actiated difference is only few hunderd KB, and on blog depends on the features and usage. If your theme uses multiple loops in a single page without any optimization plugin can take up to 2 or 3 MB (that’s was with some 8 loops in a single page). Anyway, I will soon have detailed benchmarks.
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Loving the plug in. Is MultiReviews working yet? I can’t seem to get it to do what I want.
If I was reviewing, say, a webhost, I try to insert a multiset of 4 items. When I insert it into a post I am unable to actually assign a star rating to any of the items in the multiset. Am I doing something wrong?
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I don’t know what you are trying exactly but that feature is available and working for the past few months.
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Hey, the plugin doesn’t work if i have “Featured Content Gallery” a flash plugin for wp activated. When it’s on, i cannot rate a post, just a note for anyone who has both plugin installed, they will conflict with each other and gd star cannot work.
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This is not problem with GD Star Rating. Gallery plugin JavaScript is causing the problem.
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Hey,
For MultiReview, I am trying to be able to make a post where I review a product.
In this review, I want to rate the product on several categories. I have added these categories as a multi-set.
I insert this into a post
Insert–>Multi-StarReviewMulti. Select my Multi Review set and insert.
I get this inserted
[starreviewmulti id=2 tpl=20]
When looking at my post, I have the bank of 4 categories, each of which is set up according to the way I configured my multi set, but they are all 0 stars, and I am unable to set the number of stars.
I am doing something stupidly wrong? I’m sure I’m going to look like an idiot in a minute here.
Thanks in advance!
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Multi Review isserted in the post is read only. Setting the review values is done from post edit page.
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Ok, like I thought, I was proved to be an idiot quite quickly. I didn’t scroll down far enough on the post edit page to find the review sections.
Thank you for your patience and a truly incredible plugin.
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Is it possible to configure shortcode in such way that it will display results for a particular post by its id (not cateogry id)?
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I don’t understand.
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[starrating select='post' category=8] – this will list all posts from category with id=8, what if i just want to display rating for a single post other than the one I’m writing, is there something like [starrating select='post' post=5], which would display rating only for post with id=5? I went through the manual appendix 1 but haven’t found enything like this, maybe something changed?
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You are using wrong shortcode. This one displays rating results much like the widget does.
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I might be proven an idiot, but I’ll take a risk
Post 1, Post 2 and Post 3 describe three separate products and are in the same category, if I wanted to create post 4 and write say comparison between product 1 and 3, is it possible to insert in post 4 content (via shortcode) rating (not review) of post 1 and post 3 separetly by giving post id as a parameter of shortcode? I know You built Builder to get rid of all those questions..:) buuut which shortcode You mean? Starrater – renders current post, Starreview – gives review not rating and also for current post… please help, this last time… 
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This can be done, but not with shortcode yet. This is partially done, but it will be functional in 1.5.0. Builder is far from finished, btu it will grow over time.
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Great, I’m looking foreward to 1.5.0 !
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AWESOME Plugin! We have been integrating it in to our website for the past few days and in one of your earlier comments to another post you refer to “enable Display custom rating CSS settings” as an option – I cannot find that option, can you point me in the direction of that? thank you kindly.
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This is obsolete. Now for rendering plugin uses templates, so that options is removed.
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