The other day I launched AFFpinions.com, an opinion based website about affiliate networks. AFFpinions.com simply let the networks pitch to users and affiliates or users who are a part of that specific network get to write their own personal experience. This helps others decide if they want to join a specific network and consider branding for the networks. But in building a site, I needed a plugin or even a system to help track and rate the networks base on user experience.
Prior to my new concept and I stumbled upon WP Review Site, which is a review system for wordpress. This simply plug in creates a full review site system via wordpress. It gives you the necessary tools such as the rating system to create a proper review looking website. When I first seen this I was intrigue and of course curious and wanted to see its power.
Installation
The installations was very easy, I downloaded -> Uploaded -> Activated! Once that is done you are able to customize some options such as the rating categories and the display of the voting box. There really wasn't much with the settings, since it seemed it was all pre configured. Screen shot below:
Features
There really isn't much. It is just adding a voting box to the comments and embedding the results within the comments. WP Review Site does come with an affiliate linking system, similar to WP Affiliate Elite.
WP Review Site can automatically turn keywords in your post text into affiliate links. Specify keywords on the left, and the URL those keywords should be linked to on the right.
This is fairly neat since you want to monetize your review site as much BUT neatly as possible. Other than these 2 features, it does lack in some features and I have brought this attention to Dan creator of WP Review Site. Some features that would be helpful or beneficial are:
- Ability to Warn reviewers to vote, if voting system is all 0's
- Let users only submit 1 review or limit reviews per post
- Ability to reply to someone's review without voting (Brian's threaded looked weird)
- Let users register first prior to leaving a comment
- Ability to Reverse comments (I edited wordpress to show reverse comments)
- Paginate comments
These are just some options I found which should have been part of the script. WP Review Site, seemed as if Dan only implemented the Wp Voting plugin into his script with a lot of adjustments. There were no big changes to the wordpress tables and deactivation of the plugin is simple as just clicking deactivate.
Off Things
Somethings I found a little off, I stated to let users register before leaving a comment. When I enable sign up requirded within WordPress. The comment box was still live, I looked over at the comments.php and the standard comment codes were missing to incorporate sign ups and non sign ups. What if I wanted to only let real users sign up and leave comments and reviews? A person leaves a comment and then hit submit later to be denied because I set up sign up required, leaving the user to sign up, wait for password, re enter his login, enter the review again. By that time the reader would have left.
There should have maybe been more selection of premium templates. Having 2 templates was ok, but I think it needed to have a variety of selection since features were not all there. The themes are fairly basic and really has no theme, it is a basic blog theme if I can describe it.
Overall
I saw a good potential in thus plugin but feature wise was not there, again it was just adding the voting system to the comments. Since review sites are very powerful I decided to go a head and give this a try. I liked the script since it made life a little bit more easy in setting up a review site. I just needed more features and needed more 'kick' from the plugin. Have a look for yourself, they constantly do updates so see for yourself if it is what you are looking for WP Review Site
