GD Rating System is brand new rating plugin, successor to popular GD Star Rating plugin, but it has nothing in common with the old plugin. GD Rating System is available in two editions: Free and Pro.
GD Rating System uses modular structure to implement most of the plugin features as rating methods and addons. Free plugin version has one rating method and four addons. Pro version has 3 rating methods and 10 addons. Pro version includes more rating star images, additional widgets, shortcodes and rendering templates.
System Requirements
GD Rating System requires WordPress 4.0, and it is fully tested with latest 4.4 version. Plugin should work with older WordPress versions too, but it is not tested or supported with WordPress before 4.0. Plugin is also tested with PHP 7.0 and it all works fine.
Plugin performance
One of the most important aspects in plugin development was to make it highly optimized. The plugin uses internal objects cache to minimize the number of SQL queries, and it fully supports the use of cache plugins with the help of Dynamic Load addon that will load rating blocks through AJAX and avoid ratings end up cached in the HTML based cache. Next week I will post more information about plugin performance, the number of SQL queries, used memory and more.
Main plugin features
GD Rating System Free comes with basic Stars Rating method. But, Pro version includes Stars Review method and Thumbs Rating (check out the image on the right). The free version includes 4 basic addons for Posts and Comments integration, rich snippets and dynamic load. It also has shortcodes (for rating block and list) and widget for rating list.
Pro version includes very useful addons for Dummy Data, support for WP REST API (WordPress 4.4), admin ehancer and editor (you can edit values for individual votes), GEO location (full information about each vote IP) and support for Shortcake (Shortcode UI) plugin for visual editing of shortcodes. Pro version has additional shortcodes and widgets for every rating method.
You can check out plugin mini website for more information about the features, and knowledge base for videos showing plugin features. More coming soon.
And more…
GD Rating System is just released, and bugs are to be expected, so please let me know if you find any issues. Also, documentation is still in works, and knowledge base articles will be expanded over the next days, so if you need something that is still not documented, let me know.
Over the next few months, plugin will get more features, and I have long roadmap to go through, and I am looking forward to suggestions.
If you want to test GD Rating System Pro, you can request demo website where you can check out all the plugin features and decide if the Pro version is what you need. If not, you can download the free version, and evaluate it and maybe later decide on an upgrade. The free version can be download from WordPress plugins repository: GD Rating System on WordPress.org.
