At this moment I can confirm that GD Star Rating 1.7.0 will be released on Sunday, October 11 2009. There are many changes in this release, bug fixes, code refactoring, several new things including more filters to control plugin rendering.
With this version, support for WordPress 2.6.x will be gone, and these versions of WordPress are required for plugin to work: 2.7.x, 2.8.x or 2.9. With this, many old and now obsolete code is gone, I re-factored most of the JavaScript code, added cache plugins support for multi ratings and fixed all bugs reported so far.
Now is time to make the plan for the next milestone release and the series of minor releases leading to GD Star Rating 1.8.0. I have still to decide what features are next, and also to consider the fact that I don’t have much free time, so it will be better to focus on small set of features that will be more realistic to complete. I can confirm that there will be some work done on the Wizard that can be used to set the plugin much easier without going through all the plugins settings, and that will be idea for less experienced WordPress users.
So, if you have an idea about the feature plugin needs, or idea about improving existing plugin features, please leave a comment and explain exactly what should be done next. I will make official announcement sometime next week.
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Maybe a nice new feature could be rich snippets support ?
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html
Great plugin, many thanks again !
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This is great idea, and it’s going on my drawing board. Minor problem is testing, because Google can’t guarantee that data will be used at all, but it shouldn’t be too hard to implement.
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Thanks to the author for providing this wonderful plugin..
I’m using this plugin for around 6 months and It’s a good plugin ..
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Hi,
I have been searching for a solution to this for the last 10 hours -literally!!!! And to no avail, so any help would be greatly appreciated.
The thing is this would seem such a commonly used function that I would of thought I could locate the answer to somewhere.
I am trying to display the rating results of a particular post/article on a different page. So to break it down showing the rating results for post id 1 on post id 2 etc etc. I want multiple results on this page, but want to intergrate these seperately, and through the use of shortcode, and this is what I cant figure out.
Im pretty sure that to display this directly in my theme files I would use the function “wp_gdsr_show_article_review” and then just set the post using $post_id = 1, but of course I want this to be displayed by the use of shortcode direct into a post or page!!
And after much reading I cant find the answer to this, and cant work out how to create the shortcode I require myself using your user guide – short code section (appendix 1), or indeed the builder.
Maybe this has been asked and answered a 100 times before (I can imagine it has, but im screwed if I can find it anywhere) So apologies if so and please just humour me here.
This is driving me crazy and would seem the first thing that anyone who uses this plugin would want to do.
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Some shortcodes will get post_id parameter (like the function does) in 1.7.0.
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Ok thanks, thought I was going crazy over here. I will just wait for new release.
Cheers for your response.
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Actually just to be sure here, you say ‘some shortcodes’, so what id like to know is will the function im after be made into a shortcode in 1.7.0 and itself have the post_id parameter? Or will what im after be acheivable in 1.7.0 (as i guess if the parameter is added to the current shortcodes available it will serve to acheive the same purpose)
Ta
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I know you’re working on additional compatibility with WPMU + BuddyPress.
Just making sure this is on your to-do!
—
Filtering the BuddyPress activity stream with rating text instead of comment text would be ideal.
eg. User commented on the blog post “Hello World”
Could be:
User rated “Hello World” 4 out of 5 stars
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Not sure if this is the right place for this…
I am trying to load and display ratings thru an Ajax call but it seems that the $(document).ready function causing the rating to work properly is somehow .. broken/unbinded.
Is there a way to “rebind” the JQuery code on the stars click event ?
Thanx in advance.
–Panos
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It’s not a good place, but anyway. To make such a call is very, very complicated, because needed parameters are not simple to put together and depend on many things. Each call requires 10 or more parameters and some of theme depend on the logged (or not) user. Binding functions is a least of the problems here.
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Hi,
I’m working with WPMU 2.8 and looking for a post rating plugin have been testing GD-rating for a few hours.
It works fine on a blog per blog level, though there are some glitches with managing which blog has access to the plugin.
More, there would be problem with autoactivating the plugin for all blogs because on initial blog creation or plugin activation that creates error because the database tables for GD don’t yet exist.
If I can make a suggestion, what I’d like and I think would also be simplier would be to have a GD for WPMU version that works with the post-indexer plugin. This post indexer simply creates a table (wp-site-posts) that consolidates all posts from accross all blogs, in their most recent state. I think if there was a single set of GD-rating tables, handling ratings for all posts accross all blogs and linking to the post indexer table that could make for a fairly light and simple solution. (There is also a WPMU comment indexer plugin).
In the current state, I have to give up on GD-rating and look for another solution. Will check the new release though.
Thanks
Catherine
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This has been discussed before, and it’s very unlikely to have only one set of tables for all blogs on MU website. First reason is that I would need to rewrite a massive amount of code (not only rewrite but test more than 500 or so SQL queries, and that will take too much time, and since this is all done for free I am not ready to spend a month or so on that). Second reason that for large MU websites with many blogs some tables will grow a lot and get very, very slow. That’s why all important tables in WPMU are blog based not site based. I have a lot of experience with SQL and such level of merging will be a performance killer.
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I think what the poster is referring to is the existing work done by wpmudev (who also have lots of sql + lots of wpmu experience).
http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/post-indexer
This plugin creates the table you would need.
http://ocaoimh.ie/wordpress-mu-sitewide-tags/
As does this (by pulling in a copy of the post).
There’s also a way to do it for comments
http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/comment-indexer
I think these plugins would provide the database / index you need to attach ratings to posts (may have to add a table or two).
If the home page, or the site-wide widgets only took into consideration the last 5000, or even 500 posts on the entire deployment, that would be sufficient for many “top rated” lists.
These plugins are GPL, so let me know if you need a copy. I’d like to find a whole-site rating solution soon (contact me for details).
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But again, first and main problem is to rewrite and test ALL SQL queries. I simply can’t spend a month on that.
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OK Millan ,
Thanks for your response. This was just a suggestion on my part.
I actually thought that making use of the aggregated global posts table, build by the WPMU post indexer would save having to either lop through each blogs gdrs tables, or creating a specific aggregated gdrs table.
The post indexer table provides a unique ID for each post and page across the entire WPMU site.
But obviously, I understand that the structure is very different from that of the WP database and that means some rewritting.
I believe the premium.WPMUDEV.org developpers do have plans to produce a WPMU compatible rating plugin themselves.
Anyhow, GD is your project and is great. I don’t have any expectation when it comes to Open source software, I’m only gratefull that they happen to be available.
Regards
Catherine
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While there are a number of things I’d like to see in a site-wide rating plugin (see thread: http://premium.wpmudev.org/forums/topic/polls-and-rating-how-popular-are-his-plugins#post-15607 ) .. the most pressing would be a way to simply
(1) list the cached state of each post rating as a field output (basically calculate the vote total and store it as a field which can feed into the post indexer) – perhaps set up a cron to update the ratings hourly.. and
(2) allow a user on the home page to rate a post on a sub-blog.
From what I gather, it’s #2 that would require the bulk of new the sql work. Do you think that modifying GDSR is a good course of action, or would developing a more specialized solution be better, given your availability and workload? What would you estimate in terms of time and budget to modify your plugin to work with the post-indexer to accomplish the two items above (email me)?
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Don’t get me wrong, I will fix all WPMU related problems. At this moment 90% of GD Star Rating works fine with WPMU. And over time it will be fully compatible. But, merging tables will not happen.
I am not sure what wpmudev team is working on for expanding WPMU, but as I can see some of the things they do go against the basic design of WPMU, and I don’t like that because their products are not free, and basically I can’t spend time working on something that will be used by the fraction of plugin users.
Also, WPMU will be merged into WP in the next 6-7 months, and that is also going to be a game changer for WPMU community.
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Plugin has number of filters and actions that can be used for all kinds of things, and I am prepared to add more of them. But supporting WPMUDEV specific plugins will be a problem for me, because they are not free, and used by the fraction of users, and at this point number of users is kind of major infulence in decision making for new plugin features. I don’t have much experience in working with WPMU in general, and considering my current number of projects I am working on (my or for clients), I doubt that I will have time to go much deeper into WPMU in the next 3-4 months. My work is now all about standard WP. As for the second point of cross-blog voting, this will also require too many changes.
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Understood.
What about using the sitewide tags plugin?
http://ocaoimh.ie/wordpress-mu-sitewide-tags/
It seems like the GDSR plugin could run on the blog where sitewide tags pulls the posts to (be it the home page, or the ‘tags’ blog). In this use case, the plugin would run as if it were on a plain wp install.
Would it be feasible to then run a cron job to calculate the voting between two blogs (the original post location and the tags blog)?
I too would like to find a solution that is not tied to wpmu, as that transition is looming.
What are your thoughts on the url-based voting? Perhaps that is a way to solve both problems (effectively making the voting action into a url, eg post/vote/4 for four stars). This would allow people to vote on a post from an rss feed (which could be used in wpmu to do what I need for the time being).
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Yes, this is good idea. But, I recently have rewritten parts of plugin to support cache plugins. With that I have made changes to JavaScript and ajax code. This can be used for cross-blog calls at one point. Also, by the time I release 1.8 I will rewrite most of the integration functions for better flexibility, and that will allow use of BLOG_ID in every call. Than all that is needed is to modify SQL queries, but this time it will require much less work due to already existing changes. As the time frame goes, this is not going to happen before 1.9 or even 2.0 of plugin. Also, I will definitely need a help from someone with WPMU experience. 1.8 should be ready in about 6 weeks.
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will this fix the ‘GD star’ tab appearing in the dashboard for all user levels? you mentioned this would be fixed in a future release?
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I added additional control for this in 1.7.0 to be released tomorrow. New default level is 1, so subscribers will not see it.
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Hi all.
I discovered this plugin yesterday and I amaze of it perfection.
I am impatient to test the new release.
Thanks to GD Team and congratulations for this incredible plugin.
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Thanks for the plugin.
Please add sorting by views to gdsr_sort.
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You know, I love GD star rating plugin. I have used the free version on some of my blogs and it works flawless.
There is only one thing that makes me feel sad about rating plugins. The star images create 100s of http requests which makes the site appear so slow. I really don’t understand if there are only 5 star images on a page, why are these images being loaded 50 times? I’m trying to cut down http requests on one of my blog and a specific page has 114 http requests out of which 50 http requests are because of these star images. If anyone has a fix for this, will appreciate a lot.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not the only problem with GD star rating plugin, it is exceptionally good. I believe it is a problem with the way WordPress generate pages. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thankyou,
Dev.
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Holy cow, what a typo mistake, “Don’t get me wrong, this is not the only problem with GD star rating plugin, it is exceptionally good”.
Damn, I’m tired. I meant to say, The GD Star Rating plugin is exceptionally good and it does all that anyone could wish or dream for. The only problem is WP. WP generates pages in a way that images and other elements create a hell lot of http requests.
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GD Star Rating images are loaded through CSS requests, and the way CSS works is that if an image is found in 100 CSS elements, it will be requested and loaded only once. And no matter if you use 1 or 20 stars in a block that is only ONE image. But to ensure better customizations, plugin CSS file contains classes for each stars set, so for 10 stars set, that is 60 images to load.
There are two ways to deal with this. One is provided in plugin, and you can select stars types and sizes to include in CSS (there is a tutorial), and the other is to use htaccess that will for all images send header telling browser that they will not change, to trigger caching.
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What about Multi ratings in the comments?
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