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Do you need some type of star rating system on your WordPress blog to review products and services?  I did a little poking around and found one that’s pretty slick because it not only allows you to create your own categories with a graphical icon ratings, but it also allows you to enter a bit of dialog for each rating.

I like having that extra dialog because when I see a 5 star rating for something, I want to know what criteria the reviewer used to give it 5 stars.  This plugin will do just that.

Plugin(s) You’ll Need

Easy Review Builder For WordPress- This plugin allows you to create unlimited reviews in WordPress. 

• Each rating system can have up to 8 categories. 
• It comes with 4 icon sets. 
• You can also define the maximum number of stars to use in your review.
• Set up your own CSS on the rating divs.
• Can tally and specify an average overall rating.

The plugin uses shortcode notation and it’s only got a few codes.  The entire shortcode sequence must be entered in one continuous line with a space, not carriage return, between parameters.  Click here for complete instructions on the author’s website.

Here’s a quick look at the shortcode parameters.

title – An optional title for the rating table.  Omit it to use the default text ‘Review Score’ title.  The title nicely displays in a shaded gray header on the rating table.

You can have up to 8 categories in a rating table and each category has 3 parameters.  Replace the ‘X’ with the category number 1 thru 8. 

catXtitle – The category name. 

catXrating – A numeric notation representing  the number of stars you’re rating a category .  Can be whole or half like 3 or 3.5.

catXdetail – Your commentary for your rating.

icon- The name of the icon set to use; star, star2, gear, and bluestar.  You can also create your own set.

ratingmax – The maximum number of stars each category should have.  The default is 5.

overall – Calculates the average of all ratings in the table.  By default, this is set to “true” and will automatically display as the last line in the rating table, but you can set it to “false” to turn it off.

summary – Goes hand-in-hand with the overall tag.  This is an optional statement that you can make regarding your overall opinion about the item you’re rating.

tablecss – You can include custom CSS for the rating table. 

Here’s the shortcode I used to create the rating table show below.

[easyreview title="Rating For Easy Review Builder" cat1title="Ease of Use" cat1detail="Easily insert shortcode into posts and pages. No fiddling with template files." cat1rating="5" cat2title="Categories" cat2detail="Rate items using 1 to up to 8 categories." cat2rating="5" cat3title="Customization" cat3detail="Include custom comments for each of your category ratings." cat3rating="5" summary="Easy Review Builder will make your review sites far more informative than just the usual graphic only star ratings."]

[easyreview title="Rating For Easy Review Builder" cat1title="Ease of Use" cat1detail="Easily insert shortcode into posts and pages. No fiddling with template files." cat1rating="5" cat2title="Categories" cat2detail="Rate items using 1 to up to 8 categories." cat2rating="5" cat3title="Customization" cat3detail="Include custom comments for each of your category ratings." cat3rating="5" summary="Easy Review Builder will make your review sites far more informative than just the usual graphic only star ratings."]

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