GD Rating System Pro 3.7: Iapetus

Finally, after few delays, a lot of testing and so many changes, the brand new GD Rating System Pro, version 3.7 is here, along with all the addons that are updated for compatibility with the new main plugin version.

Before we go on, make sure you read about the changes to the Rating Club Membership license and get the 15% discount coupon that will be available for a few more days.

The new version development was mostly driven by the plugin users feature requests, and while some of these requests have proven very complicated to do, I believe that the changes made will contribute to making the plugin even better and usable for some very interesting use cases.

But, all this required major core changes that can be considered break changes for all the plugin addons, so it is very important to update the main plugin and all the used addons at the same time, and to go through the plugin update screen to make sure that some of the plugin settings are converted properly.

Most significant updates are in the JS/CSS loading, rating query, widgets, settings rules, and core addons architecture. JavaScript and CSS have a new option to allow for dynamic loading: required files will be loaded only if there is anything related to the rating on the page. Right now, this feature is disabled by default, but it will be enabled by default from version 4.0. For now, you can enable it from plugin Settings -> Basic Settings -> Advanced panel.

Rating query is updated to accept the published date for rating items (works for posts rating items), and you can specify the range of published dates or exact date/time combination. With all that, there are changes to the widgets to include new query field. And, the widgets have gone through much more changes. All widgets now use special base classes to make the processing easier, and the interface has changed to make the complex querying possible, most importantly detection of the post type and terms of the current page, and changing results based on that.

There are many changes to the plugin core addons architecture, and all built-in and external addons have been modified to use these changes. You can’t run any of the new addons versions on the older versions of GD Rating System Pro! A most important change, are the rewritten settings rules. The handling of the rules have changed, and they can be expanded with terms based filters (for post type based items), allowing you to adjust any rating method for post items based on the categories, tags or other terms. By default, this is disabled.

Rule settings are very useful when using Multi Rating methods, allowing you to specify different multi rating series to different categories. This way, if you have a store, for instance, with vastly different types of products, you can use different series for different store categories under the same post type.

To check it out in action, we have prepared a new demo based on the WooCommerce with the use of Multi Ratings and User Reviews addons.

As for other changes, this version includes a long changelog that has many updates and improvements in various plugin areas and fixes for several bugs reported by users or discovered during the development.

Considering how many changes are included, please, report any issues you may find with the new version.