Star Rating for Reviews
Star Rating for Reviews is a simple WordPress plugin that inserts pretty rating stars based on the score you assign using intuitive, inline [rating:] tags. It can also calculate and output overall ratings for you based on all previous scores you have assigned, useful for reviews that have multiple categories or an album review where each track is assigned a score.
This plugin supports storing rating data into your WordPress database. These data can then be retrieved by functions provided to output a list of reviews, sortable by date, post title or rating scores. Random reviews function and single post function (to be used in WordPress loop) are also provided, see Usage section for detailed description of these functions.
Features
- uses simple, intuitive tags to generate kawaii inline rating stars for your posts
- supports versatile rating systems
- supports text only output for RSS
- automatically calculates and displays overall ratings, if desired
- supports storing rating scores automatically into database *
- supports outputting list of reviews sortable by date, post title or rating scores *
- supports widget-like, sortable table of reviews *
- supports custom star images
- supports custom prefixes and suffixes for your own CSS class
- supports globally forced star count for consistency
- uses as many stars as you want! **
- standards compliant: valid XHTML
* database writing has to be enabled via Options
** limited to 20 for practicality
Usage
Presentation
Data (for advanced users)
Presentation
Once installed, you can add rating stars to your posts by using [rating:] tags.





By default, this will be interpreted as 3.5/5, as shown in the rating stars generated. Default denominator can be changed via options detailed in the next section. Even though this tagging style is simple, it might not be future proof when someday you decided to change the default denominator to say 10 (for whatever reason). In this case 3.5 will be interpreted as 3.5/10, which is very different compared to 3.5/5. Once you start using this tagging style, make sure you are not going to change the default denominator in the future. :)




“3/4″ will generate a “3 out of 4 stars” rating and “2/8″ will generate “2 out of 8 stars” and so on. This will continue to work as long as the denominator is not larger than 20. Beyond that, the score will be normalized and display in the default 5 stars system, as shown in the next example.





The “Rating:” prefix you can see in all examples above is the default prefix, which you can remove easily to show just the stars or add in your own custom CSS class by changing some options. More information about this in the Options section.
Overall rating:
Automatically calculated overall rating based on previous scores can be inserted using the following tag style:





Similar to the first example, this overall rating will be represented in the default 5 star rating system. It is possible to force the overall rating to be outputted in different number of stars by using the following tag style:




The “Overall Rating:” is again, the default prefix, which can be changed via options. For more information, see Options.
Custom images:
First of all, the default star image used is taken from the excellent Silk icon set. These png icons support different background colours via png transparency. However, you can still use your own star images by replacing the 3 images included in the “star-rating” plugin folder, namely “star.png”, “halfstar.png” and “blankstar.png”. File extensions can be changed via options if desired.
For your information, “tiny-star.png”, “tiny-halfstar.png” and “tiny-blankstar.png” are only used by special functions that output list of reviews based on stored data in the database. Feel free to replace them with your own images as well if desired.
Text only output:
By default, this plugin will output text only ratings for your RSS feeds and use graphical output when someone is reading the post on your site. This is, in my opinion, the optimal choice since some RSS readers do not support images. However, if you like you can output images for your RSS feeds too, or oppositely, output text only ratings for both RSS and posts displayed on your site. Please refer to the Options section if you want to make these changes.
Data (for advanced users)
Database writing is turned off by default. In order to use these advanced features, you will need to manually turn it on by changing the option values, see Options for more details. If you are not interested in this feature, you should skip this section.
Custom fields
If database writing is turned on, this plugin will parse your document searching for rating tags and store the overall rating score into a custom field called “rating” when you edit or save your blog post. The name of the custom field can be changed via options to prevent conflict with other plugins. The reason why custom field is used instead of a new database table is the ease of implementation and the fact that most people write reviews occasionally. The downside of this is when uninstalling this plugin, you will need to manually remove those “rating” entries within the custom field table.
To check if this plugin is doing its job, once you turned on the database writing, go to edit one of your older posts which already used the rating tags (or simply insert the rating tags into any post if you’re new to this plugin) and choose “Save and Continue Editing”. Now, check the custom field near the bottom of the editing panel to see if a new “rating” field has been added. If it’s there, congrats, this plugin is working properly; if it’s not, you might have forgotten to turn on the database writing option, or the rating tag is invalid. Feel free to post your questions here (with detailed explanation) if you can’t get this to work.
Once you turned on this auto insert feature, you can still disable it for specific post by putting [rating:none] anywhere in your blog post, preferably at the bottom for tidyness.
Functions
4 different functions are provided in this plugin that allow you to output a list of reviews based on date, rating score, or randomly selected. These functions uses “rating” custom field data to retrieve and sort the reviews. You need to either turn on autometa (see Options) or manually put these rating in yourself.
1. sr_getreviews()
sr_getreviews($limit, $orderby, $order, $usestar, $prefix, $suffix)
$limit
- number of reviews to be returned
Acceptable value: any integer
Default value: 5
$orderby
- criterion used to sort the review
Acceptable value: “date”, “title”, “rating”
Default value: date
$order
- sort ascendingly or descendingly
Acceptable value: “ASC”, “DESC”
Default value: “DESC”
$usestar
- number of star to be used for rating
Acceptable value: any integer
Default value: 5
Note 1: put in “0″ to output rating in percentage i.e. numerically
Note 2: rating stars used are with tiny prefix (tiny-star.png, tiny-blankstar.png etc.), they are smaller than regular stars in blog post
$prefix
- prefix to be put before the code for each reviews
Acceptable value: any valid XHTML tags or plain text
Default value: “<li>”
$suffix
- suffix to be put after the code for each reviews
Acceptable value: any valid XHTML tags or plain text
Default value: “</li>”
<?php sr_getreviews(5,date,DESC,5); ?>
You can also output ratings in percentage format as illustrated below:
<?php sr_getreviews(5,date,DESC,0); ?>
2. sr_getrandom()
sr_getrandom($limit, $usestar, $prefix, $suffix)
See the explanation above for each parameter.
<?php sr_getrandom(5,5); ?>
3. sr_listreviews()
sr_listreviews($orderby, $order, $usestar, $date, $limit)
This outputs list of reviews in a widget-like, sortable table format. (implemented using the awesome tablesorter plugin for jQuery)
$date
- format of date to be used
Acceptable value: PHP date format
Default value: “M j, Y”
$limit
- number of reviews to be returned
Acceptable value: any integer
Default value: “0″
Note: “0″ limit implies no limit i.e. retrieve all available reviews
<?php sr_listreviews(date,DESC,5,"M j, Y",10); ?>
| Date | Title | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| Tips: Shift+Click to sort multiple columnsPowered by Star Rating for Reviews | ||
| 2009-04-30 Apr 30, 2009 | Kuroki Meisa debuts Hellcat | 71.3 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
| 2009-03-25 Mar 25, 2009 | Perfume – One Room Disco | 70 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
| 2009-02-02 Feb 2, 2009 | Hinouchi Emi – ME… | 75.3 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
| 2009-01-31 Jan 31, 2009 | Nishino Kana – MAKE UP | 85 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
| 2009-01-12 Jan 12, 2009 | Perfume – Dream Fighter | 95 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
| 2009-01-07 Jan 7, 2009 | Proposal Daisakusen | 90 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
| 2009-01-05 Jan 5, 2009 | Arashi – truth/Kaze no Mukou e | 93.3 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
| 2008-12-22 Dec 22, 2008 | Ai Otsuka – Kurage, Nagareboshi | 90 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
| 2008-12-17 Dec 17, 2008 | GREEN/Days | 95 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
| 2008-10-10 Oct 10, 2008 | Aira Mitsuki – COPY | 60 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
4. sr_getsingle()
sr_getsingle($post_id, $usestar, $prefix, $suffix, $size)
This function is intended to be used within the WordPress Loop. You can put this within the loop to display rating score or stars in categories, tags, or main page for each posting. See examples: categories, tags, main page.
$post_id
- the ID of current post within the loop
Acceptable value: $post->ID
$prefix, $suffix
- prefix, suffix to be added before and after the ratings code returned
Acceptable value: any valid XHTML tags or plain text
Default value: ” (empty)
$size
- the size of stars, can be normal or tiny
Acceptable value: 0, 1 (0 for tiny stars, 1 for normal stars)
Default value: 0
For $usestar, see the sr_getreviews().
Customization
Starting from version 0.4, a default CSS is imported into the WordPress header, which I hope will work nicely with your blog theme. If not, feel free to open the CSS and edit it or disable the CSS import by setting $sr_mycss to 1, which will remove all the default styling for CSS classes associated with this plugin.
By default, ratings and reviews returned by listing functions are hardcoded with special CSS classes, namely “sr-review” for the review permalink and “sr-rating” for the ratings returned, which can be either numerical percentage or star images.
You might want to take a look at another plugin I’ve written called “MyCSS”, which allows you to attach and edit custom stylesheet that’s independent of the blog theme you’re using. This makes it convenient and easy to organize theme independent CSS classes such as those used in plugins, saving you the trouble of appending these classes into your theme’s core CSS everytime you change a theme.
Options
Hopefully this plugin will work as desired in an “out of the box” way so that you don’t need to change anything. However, several extra options are still provided for those of you who would like to have it your way. :)
Since this plugin is still in its early stage, setting options in the WordPress admin panel is not supported yet. For now, you will need to open up the php file using either your favourite text editor or WordPress built-in plugin editor to change some of the variables you can find near the top of the code.
$sr_limitstar: globally set star count, e.g. putting 5 will ALWAYS generate your score using the 5 star rating system, put 0 to disable this feature$sr_defaultstar: default denominator when not explicitly specified in your tags$sr_prefix: custom prefix for normal ratings$sr_allprefix: custom prefix for overall ratings$sr_suffix: custom suffix, leave blank unless you want to close html tags$sr_ext: file extensions for custom star images, e.g. gif, jpg, png$sr_usetext: text only output settings, accepted values are 0, 1 and 20: images for posts and feeds
1: images for posts, text for feeds
2: text for all$sr_mycss: using your own CSS? if yes, put in 1 to disable default CSS import$sr_cuttitle: shorten post title to specific amount of character, put 0 to disable title cut off
The following are advanced options, mainly to turn on the functionality of storing ratings into database as custom field values:
$sr_autometa: 0 to turn off database writing, 1 to turn it on, this feature is disabled by default (it’s stable, I’m just leaving the choice up to advanced users)$sr_metakey: meta key for custom field, change this if there’s conflict with other plugins
Installation
- Download and extract the “star-rating-for-reviews” folder
- Upload the “star-rating-for-reviews” folder to your WordPress plugin directory, usually “wp-content/plugins”
- Activate the plugin in your WordPress admin panel
Upgrade
- Deactivate the plugin in your WordPress admin panel
- Remove the “star-rating-for-reviews” folder in your WordPress plugin directory
- Follow the installation guide above
Download
Star Rating for Reviews plugin 0.4 for WordPress (30kb .zip)
| Please donate to support active development of this plugin, thank you! |
If you like this plugin, express your love by donating and sharing this plugin with your readers!
Support
If you have any questions, suggestions, or found any bugs in this plugin, feel free to post them in your comments. I’ll try my best to answer them but there’s no guarantee, so don’t be disappointed if you do not hear back from me promptly. :/ If you find this plugin useful and feel like donating some money for my effort, please use the PayPal button above, thanks! <3
History
0.4 [2007.11.02]
- Added: Sort reviews by title
- Added: sr_listreviews() function to output all reviews in a sortable table (good for dedicated review page)
- Added: Default CSS stylesheet (can be turned off via options)
- Added: Cut off long title when getting list of reviews for sidebar
- Changed: XHTML markup for list of reviews generated
- Changed: Tiny star images
- Fixed: Division by zero if overall tag is placed at the top of a post
- Misc: Cleaned up the code and fixed minor bugs
0.3.1 [2006.09.12]
- Fixed: Sorting bugs
0.3 [2006.08.08]
- Added: Support to store rating data into database
- Added: Functions to output list of reviews, sortable by date or by rating scores
- Added: Filter to parse excerpt
- Added: Skip tag parsing by using ` character (suggested by Denis)
0.2 [2006.07.28]
- Fixed: Path error
- Fixed: [strong] instead of [b] for W3C standards
- Fixed: RSS text output bug
0.1 [2006.07.08]
- Initial release





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Hi
I installed the plugin and activated it but it there is nothing showing up on my posts to rate the post.
Do I need to add something to my single.php file for it to show up?
Thanks.
I have used this plug in on my LCD TV website. I think you’ve made a great plugin, surpassing any other rating plug in I’ve used. Thanks you.
But I can’t get the listreviews to work, even after updating the options?
This may be a great plugin if you can figure out how to make it work. I get the installation, but then what?? It doesn’t show up anywhere, there’s nothing in the plugin section of the admin panel that allows you to do anything.
I must have tried a dozen ratings plugins and they either only go in one spot or they don’t work…unfortunately, this one goes in the “they don’t work” category for me.
All I want is a simple plugin or script that allows me to put a rating anywhere on a page as many times as I need it and all should work individually. The ones that worked for me are limited. Once a rating is made on one, it effects all of them. So if I clicked on the 3rd star, if I add that code anywhere else it will show a 3 star rating.
I’m working on a site that has local restaurants and would like the user to be able rate each one.
DSoes anyone know of a plugin that works individually like I need??
This looks great. Is it possible to hard code this into a theme file instead of using the shortcode in a post? Thanks :)
Having problems with rating custom field in post. I have database writing but having trouble fixing it.
You know, when you bitch about support, andimazlan, developers who donate their time get burned out.
Crack open a book on CSS to fix your problem with star border.
It seem that the author didn’t bother with all the comments and feedback here, didn’t even answer and try to solve problems post by users.
Anyway great plugin and how to remove the border around each star image?? Please..
The plugin installs. works, but cant get it to work in the sidebar. I must be missing something easy. Im also using thesis if that matters.
plug in works but i get the starts first then the word review next with a colon like this:
XXXX Review:
I’d like to to go
Review: XXXXX
Anybody got a fix for this?
Thanks,
KK
Will there ever be support for user reviews for this plugin? So users can vote in the comments?
Hi,
I am having some troubles with this plugin. I get this error:
Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/discover/public_html/food/wp-content/plugins/star-rating-for-reviews/star-rating.php:1091) in /home/discover/public_html/food/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 850
is this an issue with the plugin or WP ?
thanks
If anyone is successful getting this free product to work, please let me know. I’m tempted to try the paid one, wordpressreviewplugin.
Installed in 3 mins and working beautifully. Thanks very much!
Thanks a lot, This plugin really rocks and the best part really is that it is free.
There is also paid plugin for the reviews : http://www.wordpressreviewplugin.info/
Great, this was just what I needed for my WP-blog!
Hey, just wondering if there is any way to display only posts from a specific category when using sr_getreviews();
Kind of like running a loop with wp_query before it?
I love this plugin but need to remove the border around each star image. I edited the CSS file but had no luck. Any help would be MUCH appreciated.
For some reason the text “rating” appears on top of the stars. I cant get them to all be on the same line like in all of the pictures. As a back up plan I tried removing the text “rating” from the code, but the star color disappears so thats not an option. Any ideas what I can do?
This does exactly what I’ve been looking for – thank you very much!
Is there any way the star ratings can output without images like in those lists in your examples?
The things i couldn’t get working in the previous post are
php sr_listreviews(date,DESC,5,”M j, Y”,10);
php sr_getreviews(5,date,DESC,5);
(they didnt show up)
I can’t get the to show up I’ve enabled $sr_autometa to 1 and the custom fields are showing up but when I include the above php code into a page or blog post nothing shows up… is there something I’m missing?
I am really confused on how to get the information to display on my website. I have successfully written the information to a database, I just don’t know how to display it.
How do you get rid of the border around the stars? I’ve tinkered with the CSS but with no success. Apologies if this has been asked and answered already, but I can’t seem to find further info here.
Download finally worked. I uploaded and enabled. See no setting. See nothing in Post Edit for this plugin.
http://www.channel-ai.com/blog/plugins/star-rating/#download
does NOTHING.
Great plugin – just what I was looking for!
Unfortunately, it seems to conflict with the ‘Wordpress Navigation List Plugin NAVT’ . The latter stops working when yours is activated.
Any ideas why?
hi my star rating plugin doesn’t exist.. why??
hi,
i’m working on your plugin to use it on my website. i think a really dumb problem but i can’t figure out how to solve it. these are the things i’ve done until know: change the star file for the images i want to use instead of stars. second, i mange to get out the border i had for all the images in y theme. now i can’t figure out how to make the stars get more together. the space between then is big, and i think it must be due to something on my template’s css but i can’t figure out what
please help!
thanks
Hi,
I love this plugin, but when I use the to make the widget-looking table showing my reviews, the ‘rating’ metakey in my posts keeps changing from the assigned number (60,70,80) to random numbers like 2480 and 3400, thus causing the following error to show up above the list:
Warning: str_repeat() [function.str-repeat]: Second argument has to be greater than or equal to 0 in /home/discojin/public_html/story/wp/wp-content/plugins/star-rating-for-reviews/star-rating.php on line 327
Also, this causes the stars displayed, instead of 10, to be the large numbers (2480~3400).
Also, is there a way to use sr_listreveiws on different pages, to not show ALL reviews, but to exclude or include categories. For example, list all reviews on the ‘all review’ page and only ‘movies’ on the movie review page?
Thanks!
-Nicole
Excellent plugin. I have been using it for a while and like it very much. Keep up the great work!
When it complies the top rated does it take into consideration the % of votes? For examle if one person votes it 5/5, would it beat out other posts who may have an average of 4.5?
Hiya.
I’ve been using your plugin for a while, and have recently updated it to the latest version.
However now I am receiving an error in my sidebar where I list my most recent reviews. The error is as follows:
Warning: str_repeat() [function.str-repeat]: Second argument has to be greater than or equal to 0 in /home/baku/public_html/blog/brainfart/wp-content/plugins/star-rating-for-reviews/star-rating.php on line 327
Could you let me know how I could possibly resolve this?
Many thanks,
Don’t know if this has been answered for you, but here you go: Had this same problem. List out your posts on a page with the sr_getreviews to see which will show you which post is the problem. Edit the post and look at the value that is being stored. I have found if the post value is higher than 100 you will get this error.
Lee
Another problem I’m seeing is that,
GD Star Rating: Settings -> Articles Posts and Pages
You are currently not offering a “do not show this on author pages”, for the author.php template pages.
That would be great if you could add that in. I do not want the rating to show up on my author pages as it has no relevance to the blog and rating.
Hi!
I think I might have caused the problem somehow.
At least now it’s working after I re-installed the plugin. So you can just forget these two posts of mine!
Activating this plugin seems to cause some problems with the latest version of Wordpress. After activating it you cannot log in or out, or post to Wordpress as all you get is a blank screen. Clearing the option active_plugins from database is a cure for this problem, but it also deactivates the plugin.
I tried with some other plugin and it doesn’t cause the same problem, so it’s probably because your plugin is not compatible with the latest version of Wordpress? Seems to be a common problem with several plugins. Noticed this as I was searching for a fix to my “blank page” problem.
Seems like you haven’t updated the plugin for a while, are you still planning to work on this? It’s a pity if not as the plugin itself was exactly what I was looking for.
I think I am missing something easy. When using the plug in the stars always display vertically. I didn’t see any information on this. Thanks for the help.
After a bit toil I finally got it to work. Great plugin! A little more functionality and customizable options would be cool too.
Hello,
I am using an “asides” plugin in my blog (http://www.piepalace.ca/blog/projects/miniposts/) and I’d like to display the rating stars within them, in the sidebar.
Is this possible? I don’t know much about programming, but I believe the sidebar is considered to be “outside the loop”, right?
I’d really appreciate any help. Thanks!
Hi,
Has anyone found a solution to the problem of getting this error message which has been reported a few times already?
Warning: str_repeat() [function.str-repeat]: Second argument has to be greater than or equal to 0 in /home/fergusga/public_html/wp-content/plugins/star-rating-for-reviews/star-rating.php on line 327
Thanks
Graham
How can I remove the star border ?
http://i35.tinypic.com/245d9g1.jpg
That border, thanks :)
When do you think this plugin is going to get some more updates? Added functionality?
Some better documentation too? It’s hard to figure out how to use it immediately. There aren’t any settings under Settings or Manage, I had to go read the readme.txt, and it still doesn’t explain very well how to use the plugin.
It’s a great plugin and I’d love to feature it on my blog, but some things need to get cleaned up first.
is there anyway to restrict this to one category? I only want it to display posts from one single category..
I want to use this plugin for multiple feature ratings e.g.
Nokia N-82 (Prod. Name)
Rate by feature:
Performence: XXXXX
Design: XXXXX
where:
Nokia N-82 is product and i want that visitor can rate this product by features (Performence, Design). ‘X’ are the rating stars
I hope you understand. please reply, Thanks
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