Many thanks to Loud Reviewer Frank Prendergast for spotting a bug in our WordPress plug-in. This bug prevented users from setting review posts to publish in the future. The bug has now been fixed and the updated plug-in is available here.
You've probably noticed how quiet we've been on the blog. Not only have we been fixing a lot of small bugs on the site that crept in with the Version2 launch but we're been working hard on building our API. This will enable other sites to embed our reviewing functionality on their pages. We'll be going live very shortly with the first partner on this. This XML API is accessible directly, using a PHP library or using a JS library (with more coming soon). If this is something you'd like to hear more about, please contact conor AT loudervoice DOT com. We're putting together some information pages on it at the moment too.
I can see how leveraging the LouderVoice engine could be really useful for online retailers. Software-As-A-Service - Yay!
SaaS all the way, yay!
Is there a support forum for Loudervoice WordPress plugin? I am having problems with it:
- there's no Manage->LouderVoice->Settings menu created after plugin activation
- Once a post is marked as Review, plugin would duplicate the title/link of the post. WordPress renders post title anyway, and now LouderVoice plugin also renders item title and rating. I understand that it HAS to do it in order to add hReview tags to the elements of the review, but there are no guidelines on how to intergate it with WordPress themes to avoid such a duplication.
- not clear from the documentation if it changes the RSS feeds as well (i.e. whether it's adding the hReview tags to the feeds).
I'm not an expert on writing plugins for WordPress and I dont know PHP, but I think the plugin is not doing a good job integrating with wordpress's themes.
It adds filter to 'the_content', and as the result the title and link of the post are duplicated, both on post pages and main index page.
What it should do is use more then one filter:
1) Add filter on the entire post, which adds the top-level hReview tags
2) Add filter on the title to add item-name hReview micro-format tags
3) NOW add the content filter to wrap it in hReview micro-format's "description" tag
like this:
add_filter('the_content','bootstrap_post_hReview_wrapper');
add_filter('the_author','bootstrap_post_hReview_author_wrapper');
etc.
It would be nice if half-star ratings were allowed too, like B-, C+ etc. or 2.5 stars out of 5.
Hi Maxim,
We'll get back to you shortly on the details of your plugin comments.
The LouderVoice menu is in Settings->LouderVoice_Settings.
We add hreview to the RSS feeds since that's how we actually collect the content.
We won't be adding half stars to the plug-in but we should be able to support them on our site if someone uses halves on their blog manually or via another hreview-compatible plugin. Others have asked for a scale of 10 etc so it's hard to meet everyone's needs!
Hi.
Re Settings->LouderVoice Settings: shouldn't there be an option to change LouderVoice user name? There isn't. It's still possible to change user name when editing the post marked as Review, but for some reason user name is not inserted into the URL in the "Vote on []'s review on LouderVoice". I hard-coded it through the plugin editor for now.
Re half-stars: I already use scale of 10, which is default for PulseSterne plugin. The only difference is presentation: PulseSterne can be configured to display 10 stars or 5 stars with halves. Both presentations are supported by hReview microformat rating tag.
Looking forward to hear from you.
We'll add all your feedback to our plan for the next version of the plugin. Appreciate all your ideas and points.