Don’t get me wrong – I’m not about to go and create a cheese review site. After all, that’s already been done. But it could certainly be done better…
You may wondering if I have in fact finally gone mad. Well I have, but that’s rather besides the point. The point is that review sites are all the rage these days. Affiliate marketers love them because they are a great way of earning commission on products, and people like them because they want to know what is good and what is not.
Which brings me back to cheese, which I have used as an example to showcase a rather spiffy plugin known as Author hReview.
Red Leicester - it's a good cheese.
The plugin adds an extra widget to your post screen, which you can populate with various bits of information which is then packaged neatly into a little review box.
You have a few options as to how the review summary box should be displayed, and you can also add a “Recent Reviews” widget to your sidebar.
Furthermore, Author hReview integrates with Google to display ratings on the search engine results page. This helps your site to stand out – people seem to be naturally drawn to ratings (I’m sure someone has done a psychological study on it).
All in all, Author hReview is a solid little plugin that allows you to quickly and easily turn your WordPress blog into a review site. Enjoy!
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hello Hesham, i tried this plug-in and it works great on light backgrounds. But, on a dark backgroup, say the website which is having black background, it doesn’t appear nice. I wanted to attach a screen shot here but no option. Please give me some idea. Is it possible to change the CSS? any idea?
so what about grouping via review types? or is that all still on the core of wordpress taxonomies, categories, tags, etc?
I have seen many review plugins out there, and most seem to mess with the foundation and layout of the code so they dont provide much content related value.
The plugin used to combine aggregate review and rating rich snippets to come up with stars in search results, Google has made changes a couple of weeks ago, so I had to re-code some part of the plugin and drop the aggregating review method!
The reason I tell you this is I try to make the plugin reliable by focusing on only on thing, which is editorial reviews, and work only with normal posts at this level of development!
The plugin doesn’t mess with anything, and it use a simple core WordPress functions to insert the rich snippets with a simple meta box in posts.
If the plugin is stable, then you can say that I need to make sure that Google is stable :)
I do like a good cheese.
That looks great! I have a bunch of reviews on one of my sites, and I was thinking of doing a microformat plugin like this… But this is much better.
Glad to hear that, thanks.
hello Hesham, i tried this plug-in and it works great on light backgrounds. But, on a dark backgroup, say the website which is having black background, it doesn’t appear nice. I wanted to attach a screen shot here but no option. Please give me some idea. Is it possible to change the CSS? any idea?
Sure you can edit the CSS, I suggest using a tool like FireBug to inspect the styles!
Glad you like the look of it Luiz!
so what about grouping via review types? or is that all still on the core of wordpress taxonomies, categories, tags, etc?
I have seen many review plugins out there, and most seem to mess with the foundation and layout of the code so they dont provide much content related value.
The plugin used to combine aggregate review and rating rich snippets to come up with stars in search results, Google has made changes a couple of weeks ago, so I had to re-code some part of the plugin and drop the aggregating review method!
The reason I tell you this is I try to make the plugin reliable by focusing on only on thing, which is editorial reviews, and work only with normal posts at this level of development!
The plugin doesn’t mess with anything, and it use a simple core WordPress functions to insert the rich snippets with a simple meta box in posts.
If the plugin is stable, then you can say that I need to make sure that Google is stable :)
Would love to see something like this integrated with user submitted testimonials.
Customer testimonials are not supported in this plugin as it focus on editorial reviews only, there is other plugin for that!