Ratings system

This is really just a post to scope out how do-able this might be using DA, even with a bit of custom paid support.

The background is a site which features holiday properties, and we are at the point where we would like to add a ratings system allowing people to vote.

There is currently a back end database built for this.

So we are thinking about moving the site to WordPress and using an off the shelf ratings system. Pros - might be more painless, Con - not sure about how to tie it in to the existing database.

Or adding the functionality into the existing database.

In which case I'd be really grateful for any pointers as to how difficult / complicated it might get.

Off the top of my head, I'm thinking along the lines of....

We already have a table - Lodges. So in theory this just needs three new fields, 'Number_of_Votes', 'Average Score' and 'Total Score'.


The bit I'd be less sure about would be how to calculate the average score and total score, and get those values into the 'Average Score' and 'Total Score' fields.

Hopefully that makes sense, and might not actually be too complicated.

Thanks.

I've been having a rummage on the net to see what I could find, and actually found what looks like a great script:

http://megarush.net/5-star-rating-system-with-php-mysql-jquery-and-aja x/

For something that could have been quite daunting, I've managed to replicate the basic demo, and also apply it to my existing data.

I know ideally each lodge page would be a details page, but because the site owners wanted the lodge name to be in the URL, each lodge actually has its own page. So all I needed to do was replace the array values with the LodgeID, and it seems to be working pretty well. It doesn't seem to write the average score to a database field, but that might be a good little exercise to see if I can figure it out. Although for our purposes, as long as the average rating is appearing on the site, we won't need it in the data. Although we will need the total score.

Similarly with the users, I don't think we'll need site visitors to be logged in to vote, but at a later stage we will need a user group, Judges, to log in and vote.

The long term plan as I understand it is to be able to come up with a Total Score for each Lodge, where site visitors can give a score out of 3, and judges give a score out of 15 (their votes deemed to carry more weight than passing visitors).

So in theory I just need to have a second version of the basic voting behind a login, that mutiplies the score by 3 for votes made by the Judges.

I don't think we need to record who is voting, which should hopefully keep it more straightforward.

Glad to hear you found a script that can work for your needs.

Yeah - was quite impressed at getting it to work first time. Often with these sorts of things it involves trying a few that don't quite end up being as painless as they look.

Out of interest, what do you guys use for the ratings on the forum here? One thing with the one I found is that it only shows whole stars, not half stars.

Which doesn't bother me, but might be something the site owner requests.

The Rating system we use is one that Ray created using Jquery and AJAX, we did not use a third party script.

I thought maybe you guys had come up with your own custom system - maybe something that could be offered as a DW extension? Or is it not the sort of thing that lends itself to that? (I have no clue how you go from standalone code / scripts to turning them into an extension).

We don't currently have plans for adding the rating system as a trool, but you can add it to our product suggestions page:
http://www.webassist.com/community/feedback/dashboard.php