For my site I'm building, I'm looking for a functionality to review different things. For instance there will be a section to review Books, and a section to review Pubs/Bars.

Now, not wanting to re-invent the wheel, are there any plugins available that would be able to do this? Also, is a plugin the right way to go with this? I'd like the reviews to show up similar to normal stories, except with a little rating score (typically graphically), and also available from the normal "sections box". In other words, it's a story with a rating. (because I have other story sections too that won't be reviews).

Judging from the static pages plugin that I'm starting to look at, plugins seems to be a bit stand-alone from the stories. Is what I'm asking feasible for a plugin, or would it be easier to just hack the existing core code? I'd love to do this the *right* way from the start, to make later updates easier.

-Johann

I'm not sure I understand how your reviews would differ from normal stories. If you want to stick in some graphics to indicate the rating, you could do that with the image upload feature. All you would need then are new topics, e.g. "Book reviews", "Movie reviews", etc.

Of course, you could also write a plugin that offers a story editor specifically made for your reviews, but which then writes the reviews out to the normal stories table. It should be easy to lift some code from admin/story.php for that.

bye, Dirk

Ok.... maybe I wasn't too clear.

I'm imagining that a reviewer (or maybe even people commenting), can rate "something" from say 1 to 5. Then according to this rating, a corresponding graphic will be displayed, ie. 4 stars out of 5. But I can't expect the users to upload this image. Also certain mandatory fields such as Title and Author would be needed.

A possible extra idea is to have the ratings of the comments averaged, and showing the two ratings from the home page: one by the reviewer and one from the comments. But this can come later.

The second part of your response, answered my main concerns though... (and it's quite obvious really now that I think about it). The plugin can write directly to the story table and create a story and imbed the graphics. So it's basically just a "review editor" that needs to be done.

Thanks mate,
-Johann

just a thought....

I'm new at this so forgive me, but you might be able to call on the poll code for much of what you want, or if not just lift it for your plugin.

For the main reviewer, you only need to place the proper .gif for the rating in the intro section of a story.... and see if you can then add a link to the higest poll result?

something like imgsrc="/path/to/fivestars.gif" img / link to poll?

Just thinking out loud, if you get it working drop me a line, I'd like to try it out.

I like that idea... thanks
Hopefully I can have something rough by the weekend.

And I'll let you know if you let me know who you are! ;-)

-J

http://phpreview.nl.linux.org/

... phpReview, the free reviewing project. News. ... Some developers in the Netherlands
have wondered if they should rebuild phpNuke and add phpReview to it. ...
Description: Reviewing system to show online reviews of books, software in multiple languages.