GD Rating System Pro 2.2 is a major new version that brings many new features under the hood with aggregate ratings, date based queries, database table to cache query results and more.
Aggregate Ratings
The rating aggregation is one of the most requested features for this plugin. The idea is to get ratings for a specific group of rating items and calculate average rating from that set. Common uses for this is to get the rating of the author based on the individual ratings for author’s posts. Or, to get average comments ratings in one post. Currently, aggregation system supports 4 types of aggregations: items by type, posts by author, posts by term and comments by post.
This is the first iteration of the feature, and in the future version, queries will be expanded to allow limiting results by the date range, and also to return rating distribution along the average rating. For now, check out the documentation for more information on the functions you can use to get aggregated ratings.
Date based queries
This is another often requested feature, and it will allow you to calculate ratings for a specific period only. This is now available inside all widgets and shortcodes, and, finally, you can show ratings for any time period. Due to the way this works, the plugin has a new query object that deals with the period based queries.
This feature is available for all rating methods with the exception of Stars Reviews (since there is no public voting in this method).
Database cache table
Some of the new types of queries can be slow when used on the website with a lot of ratings due to the query complexity (multiple joins, filters), and it is not advisable to have these types of queries running every time. To deal with this, the plugin now has dedicated database table to store results for complex queries. And, you can control the expiration for cache values from the plugin settings panel.
Accessibility
The plugin admin side is now fully accessible. The plan is to do the same with the rating blocks, and that is planned for the next major version 2.3. I am grateful to Alex Stine for working with me on the accessibility improvements, and suggestions that will be used to build accessible rating blocks in next major version.
Other changes
In version 2.1, the plugin included functions to render custom stars rating element and stars rating badge. Now, this is expanded with functions to render custom thumbs, likes and emote this blocks. All functions allow you to render custom values as static elements, with options to change style too. Documentation includes articles for each function and examples.
There are much more improvements under the hood, including performance optimizations for some queries. And several bugs related to thumbs and likes methods are fixed.
If you find any issues with the plugin, please use the support forum to report them.
