On December 25, 2015, GD Rating System Pro 1.0 was released. Today, we celebrate plugins 2nd birthday with a brand new major release, version 3.0 bringing many new features, improvements and fixes.
GD Rating System Pro has been released 2 years ago today, and since then it has grown considerably to include 17 features as addons built into the plugin core, it has additional premium and free addons available for purchase and download, includes 7 rating methods in the core.
Version 3.0 is a massive update that brings new rating methods, new dashboard and about panels, many more new features, updates and improvements, and as always, fixes for bugs reported since last major release.
Slider Rating and Review
Slider Rating and Slider Review methods use custom built slider control and allow for various settings to adjust the look of the rating block, and it can be styled using CSS. Currently, the plugin has one slider style, with more coming in the future versions of the plugin. By default, the slider is set to the range of 100, with step set to 1. But, you can set step to smaller increments (0.1 is the lowest possible value).
As with all other methods, you have new widgets and shortcodes available for both Rating and Review methods, support for WP REST API, Rich Snippets and more.
New Dashboard and About panels
In line with other Dev4Press plugins, GD Rating System Pro now has a new dashboard and about panels. Currently, the dashboard has some basic elements, with more expected in the future versions. For now, this new dashboard is a good starting point for plugin use.
About panel is based on the look used by the default WordPress About panel. But, we have few extra pages: detailed plugin information, the page with plugin addons and page with Dev4Press plugins list. About page also includes detailed plugin Changelog page.
Other new features and updates
The plugin has a new addon for sending instant email notifications whenever a new vote is logged. You can configure emails to send to, email content and subject template and exclusion of the rating methods. This addon has global settings and it also can be configured through Rules panel.
Stars Rating method now supports RTL text orientation. Dynamic Load has a new parameter to prevent dynamic load. Plugin core has a number of updates: new methods for addons and methods registration, improved cache and database cache, new methods for the item objects.
All rating methods have new widget list template that shows the post thumbnails (when available).
More improvements and fixes
Finally, there are many minor improvements to the plugin: improved metabox tabs layout, various file organization updates, updated Client Detection and Dev4Press Shared Library. Version 3.0 also fixes some issues with rating items and votes log grids, problems with dummy data in some cases and few issues with the default styling.
Updates to addons
All plugin addons will get updates tomorrow with various updates and fixes, including Slider methods support in User Reviews addon.
If you find any issues or problems with the plugin, please report them in the support forum.
