GD Rating System Pro 1.3 – Pallas is new major release bringing new addons, support for custom icon fonts, improvements to widgets and shortcodes, new options, new filters and actions, many improvements and fixes.
Some of the features that are included in the Pro version are coming to Free plugin later this week, including one new addon, different improvements, and many new fixes.
New Addons
The plugin includes 2 new addons: Feeds and Client Detection. Feeds addon is also part of the Free plugin version. This addon is used to change what plugin displays instead of rating when content is displayed inside the RSS feed or some specialized page type like Google AMP or Facebook Instant Pages. You can choose to hide the rating block, or to only display textual rating results because feeds and similar types of pages can’t run JavaScript or/and load custom styling.
Plugin currently directly supports some of the plugins that generated AMP or FIA pages, and that will be expanded in the future. But, you can hook into the plugin to override the detection process.
Second addon, Client Detection, is used to get information about the client browser and device, or to detect bots. It can log additional information with every vote and show that information in the Votes log. If this addon detects bot visiting the page, it can make the rating block inactive.
In the future versions, it will be possible to use the client information to filter logs.
Custom icons fonts
Major new feature is the support for registering and using custom fonts for icons. And, this version already includes additional icons from FontAwesome and more than 600 icons you can use for stars rating.
To make all that possible, there are some major changes in the way the plugin works with the fonts, a lot of the rendering behind the likes and thumbs are changed. That also fixed the problem with using some of the characters triggering WordPress Emoji replacement.
The plugin additional downloads include 3 simple example plugins for adding custom font, ASCII Unicode characters for icons and custom images.
Many enhancements
Many of the feature requests from past few months are now implemented: specify terms and authors for shortcodes and widgets filtering, prevent authors from voting for own posts or comments, recalculate thumbs and likes ratings, more filters, and actions. Also, includes better data sanitation on saving, improvements and cleanup of JavaScript file, improvements on admin side interface and more.
There are several bugs fixed too: some SQL related warnings, problems with shortcodes, problems with the missing settings warnings, disabling settings rules, some duplicated CSS generated with JavaScript on page rendering and more. Check out the plugin changelog for more details.
That’s all for now, please report any issues and problems in the support forum. The knowledge base is expanded with new articles, so check it out.
Next major version 1.4 will be released in September, and it will include one new rating method and many other updates and improvements. After that, one more major version is expected in October with massive update scheduled for end of the year and version 2.0.
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.
