Rating Dominator

Rating Dominator is a powerful plugin that easily turns your blog into a ratings/review site. Between the point-and-click DHTML rating system, the aggregator functions/widgets, and the usefulness ratings that contribute to the overall accuracy of the overall rating, Rating Dominator is a power-packed plugin for WordPress.

Current Version: 3.0 (January 16th 2008)

Download: Download Rating Dominator Here

WordPress Compatibility: Tested on 2.1+

Other Requirements: mySQL version 5+ (RD uses some crazy queries that require the newer mySQL functionality)

History:

I was looking for a high-quality ratings/review plugin so I could create some Web 2.0-ish sites for marketing affiliate products. I use Web 2.0-ish loosely, because the only 2.0ish about the sites was the interaction I wanted to have with the ratings. But unfortunately, I didn’t find anything that I could use. (Sound familiar? This is pretty much why I ever create a plugin… haha)

So I took the best ratings plugin that I could find at the time – Dan Grossman’s DG Review Site - and modified it heavily to give me the power and interaction that I needed.

The biggest changes I made was to add aggregators (Best Rated Posts, Most Helpful Reviewers, etc) and the Amazon-style ”Was this review helpful?” buttons. These buttons allow your users to effectively moderate the reviews for you. Normally, if your post has 9 ratings at 10/10, and 1 rating at 1/10, that drops your average rating to 9.1/10. But with the helpfulness ratings, if your readers mark the 1 rating as not helpful, then your post’s average rating goes back up to where it should be - 10/10. (This process happens slowly, and is based on how many helpful vs not helpful marks a rating gets)

Installation Instructions:

The unfortunate drawback of a powerful plugin is that it tends to be hard to install. Although I made Rating Dominator as easy as possible to install and use, there are some modifications you have to make to your theme. Because of the explanations needed, I’ve created a separate document for it, and provided quick links from this page.

You Must Do This First!
Display Rating Entry Fields

Usage:

Rating Dominator Theme Functions (Comments)
Display Useful Numbers

Sidebar Functions (Replaced by Widgets if your theme supports them)
Best Rated Posts
Most Helpful Reviews
Most Rated Posts
Members With Most Reviews
Top Categories (Depricated – No Widget Available)

Functions That Can Replace Some Options On The Plugin Options Page
Display Comment Ratings
Display Post Ratings

Known Bugs:
None