Core of GD Star Rating 2.0 Completed

Good news. Core for GD Star Rating 2.o is done (more or less). Next step now will be to add rating types classes, make administration interface and implement everything for the front-end. Here you will find more info about how the new plugin will be organized and some other core stuff.

Plugin will store settings for site and network (for website running in multisite/network mode). Settings will be using variation of model developed for xScape themes. In new GDSR there are much less settings that are general for the whole plugin. Most of the settings are now part of the new rating classes (more on that later). To ensure better integrability, GDSR will use different loading method for the plugin and it will be more based on actions and filters than before. I thing that GDSR 2.0 will have 10 times more internal filters/actions than current versions.

One major problem with GDSR 1.x is that it had post/page/comment ratings implemented. For post/page you could use single and multi stars ratings and thumbs ratings, for comments you could use singe stars and thumbs ratings. With GDSR 2.0 many things will be implemented in a base class, and that can be used to create new rating types. By default plugin will have rating classes for: post, page, user and comments. Each class can be on site level, on network level on or both levels. This will allow implementing BuddyPress specific ratings. Each rating code will be in 4 files: init (settings for a rating type), load (main class with control over the rating type), single (settings to override specific settings for each rating element) and admin (for interface control). Plugin will allow adding new rating classes. Base rating classes is defined as abstract, and use interface to layout functions needed for each class. Saying that, complete plugin code is using PHP5 class model (all with private/public/static/abstract/interface goodness) and there will be no way to run plugin on PHP4. Believe it or not I got more than 20 requests to make plugin PHP4 compatible.

As for the rating models, GDSR 2.0 will implement single and multi star ratings, single and multi (new one!) thumbs ratings. And for each one you can have review rating (author of the post ratings existing right now also).

That’s it for now, more info coming soon.