Once you’ve done this, you’ll want to set up location data on your posts. If you’ve already created custom fields with location data, you can use them directly or you can go create your own. First the process for creating your own.

When you’re on the edit post page, go to the Custom Fields section (Where is this?) and create a custom field with the name “–Address” and the value being the address you want to associate with your post.

This field will not, by default display in your custom field tables (despite having the MyReviewPlugin “–” prefix). You can change that behavior, it’s field name, and other settings related to Google Maps on MyRP > Settings > Google Maps.

Now, if you’ve already loaded your site with content (maybe you’re upgrading an existing site) and you have addresses set in a field that isn’t –Address, you can go to MyReviewPlugin > Settings > Google Maps and find the field titled “Address field”. Change that to the field name where your addresses are stored and MyReviewPlugin will go find them as needed!

If you don’t want to use the automatic embeds, we have a shortcode mode available which allows you to flexibly add maps to any post where you like. You’ll find this under the post area, in it, you can enter an address and some dimensions, and it will create the code to add a Google Map right within your post, anywhere you like.

That said: a lot of users want something more appropriate to their niche. For example, a children’s review site might want to award happy faces or stuffed animals instead of stars; a wine review site, may wish to represent their ratings as glasses of wine; etc. MyReviewPlugin supports this very easily.

To add a new star image, simply upload it to the star image directory, which is located in wp-content/plugins/MyRP/includes/images/stars/ – this directory has a list of all the .png star images that are included with MyReviewPlugin, and in it, you can simply add your own new image.

Your image needs to be in the appropriate format. Specifically, it needs to have 1/3rd the image for each status – on (the state when the star is selected), off (unselected), hover (when the user hovers over the star), they can be any size: MyReviewPlugin will automatically adjust the size of all relevant widgets. We do strongly recommend making sure the size you do decide upon is both square and divisible by 3. Here is an example “source file”:

The default star image:

You’ll note that the image is broken in to three pieces off, on, and hover. The hover is a slightly brighter version of on, and off is the grayed out version.

When you’ve created your file, upload the file to wp-content/plugins/MyRP/includes/images/stars/ (with any unique file name) and it will show up in MyRP > Settings where you pick your star.

Make sure the size is divisible by 3 in both width and height, so sizes (widths, the height of the total file would be the width times 3) like 24, 36, 48, 64 are good choices. If you don’t want your star image to be one of those sizes, you can pad the file with transparent/white space.

If you would like to use “big stars” on some of your widgets, make sure that when you create the file, you also create a bigger version of the file, and upload it to the big/ subdirectory, with the same name. For example, if your filename is mystar.png, upload a bigger version of it to big/big-mystar.png as well. If you do not create a big version, MyReviewPlugin will simply use the small version for all embeds.

When you’ve done all this – your new star image will appear on the MyReviewPlugin > Settings page with all the other star images. Don’t fret that it doesn’t have a preview image like the others do.

Over the last week I’ve pushed out nearly two dozen little updates to SuperChartBoy. Little checkboxes that add requested functionality here, bug fixes there, absolutely nothing transformative, just the little incremental improvements that keep MyReviewPlugin the best. To update, go to http://www.myreviewplugin.com/private/recover.html and enter your license key (if you don’t know your license key, it is in your initial order emails or you can recover it at http://www.myreviewplugin.com/private/license.html), download the newly updated ZIP and recomplete the initial installation process.

If you need any help, or have any feature suggestions, I’d be happy to implement them. Send them along in a ticket/email at http://tickets.myreviewplugin.com/.

SuperChartBoy is built to allow you to create your own theme. To do that, simply go to the SuperChartBoy directory, navigate in to the themes/ subdirectory and copy one of the existing ones (if you’re not sure which to clone, take a look at them first and see which you like the best — or just start with basic).

Inside the theme directory is a file called style.css. This is the main theme file for the table: anything you write in this file will be included on any page that has your table on it.

In this file, we write CSS always prefaced with the form table.scb.scb_theme_THEMENAME — this says to select the SCB tables that have the theme THEMENAME (where THEMENAME is the name of your directory). If you change the directory, you have to change THEMENAME. For example, for the basic theme, this says table.scb.scb_theme_basic.

After that portion of the selector, you can select any element within the table. Literally any element can be selected thanks to the way SuperChartBoy adds CSS classes¹. If you haven’t watched it yet, the MyReviewPlugin Advanced CSS Customization tutorial gives you a leg up here, you can watch it any time above.

The HTML for a table in SuperChartBoy looks something like this (depending on whether it is vertical or horizontal):

<table class=’scb scb_theme_basic scb_horizontal’ [...]>
<tr class=’scb_first_row[...]‘>
[all your table data]
</tr>
</table>

Everywhere there is a CSS class, you can select it in your theme by using the syntax “.classname“, for example, to make the padding of all horizontal tables 5px, you could write:

table.scb.scb_theme_YOURTHEME.scb_horizontal { padding:5px; }

Now, to quickly sum up (some of – there are literally hundreds after all, to find others use the Advanced CSS technique in the video above) the available classes, we have a quick listing here:

• scb_horizontal, scb_vertical – applies to the table itself and indicates whether we’re rendering a horizontal or vertical table.
• The table itself has classes for literally every other option: sort order, sort type, number of posts, etc.
• scb_first_row, scb_first_col – placed on the first row (tr) and the first column (td) of each table.
• scb_last_row, scb_last_col – as above, but this time the last row and column.
• scb_row_#, scb_col_# – change # to any number to select a particular row or column: for example scb_row_3 represents the 3rd row.
• scb_element_name – selects the element name row or column (in horizontal tables, this is the first row, in vertical tables, the first column), that is the column that contains the title fields for the table elements.
• scb_even, scb_odd – selects even/odd rows or columns (applies to both rows and columns, select a particular one of the options by doing something like tr.scb_even)
• Every widget defines its own CSS classes, for example scb_predefined wraps every predefined widget, and scb_rank wraps every rank widget. Use the Advanced CSS video above to identify these classes in more detail as desired.

¹ While it isn’t likely at this point, if there is something you want to select but can’t figure out how, there are many ways to add your own classes without modifying the core code, and if its a good idea, we’ll add the class to the main SuperChartBoy build for everyone to use. Get in touch via the ticket system.

What does it do? It allows you to render a Google Map with multiple locations on it — either your own list, all posts, or the top posts on your site. The above picture is generated from the top 10 restaurants in New York (according to a randomly generated rating, don’t take this as a recommendation!): when you click on the markers, you see the post title, rating, excerpt and a link to read the user’s reviews — you can customize what it outputs in this widget in the template file¹.

You can configure where the map centers in on (allowing users to pan around to find products), how many posts to display on the map, the size, and other details of the map, etc. You can do this right within the UI.

Or using the new 6.0 API functions³, or the new 6.0 shortcode [myrpbigmap], which has the options post_ids (a comma separated list), width, height, zoom, mapType, center (address the map should start centered at), source and limit. It also has a special option “allposts” which, if set, will cause MyReviewPlugin to render the map from all the posts available on your site (i.e., the ones that are rated and have addresses), still subject to the limit command of course².

As usual, if you have any questions, feature suggestions, whatever. Send them via the support system and we’ll make sure you get sorted out as soon as possible. If you run in to any problems, make sure you’re running the latest version from the download recovery page, this is a new feature, undergoing improvements almost every day.

¹ The big map marker template file is in MyRP/includes/big_map_template.
² allposts is obviously only a good idea for sites with a relatively small number of posts. If you have thousands of posts, you should definitely not use allposts without a limit.

³ As always, these are located in api/standard.php and only meant for developers, other users can get by with the shortcodes. They include myrp_api_big_google_map_arrayposts (which takes an array of post IDs for its first parameter) and myrp_api_big_google_map.

In a minor revision of MyReviewPlugin 5 (about the time they started to become popular among WordPress users), we added support for custom post types to MyReviewPlugin. To define custom post types which you would like to be able to use in MyReviewPlugin, you simply do the following:

1. Open the file myrp-defines.php (plugins/MyRP/myrp-defines.php)
2. Find, near the first line of the file the code $myrp_post_types_supported = array("post","page");
3. Modify this code to contain your custom post type as follows: $myrp_post_types_supported = array("post","page", "your-post-type");
4. You’re done.

Its likely some users won’t want to mess around with editing files (its a simple change, but if you’re worried or just want some support): that is fine, we can do it for you. Just contact support via the ticket system and we’ll add your desired post type to your installation for you.

It is worth noting that most users who begin using custom post types, probably don’t need to be. It is almost always best to stick with the post post type if they do what you need: it ensures compatibility with older plugins (and more importantly themes), they behave in a predictable manner, etc. Unless you need to display posts and some other taxonomy on your site in some way that cannot easily be done with categories or tags as separators, you should probably stick with just using posts.

If you’d like to discuss this, need advice, or want someone to guide you through adding support for other post types, just get in touch. Someone at MyReviewPlugin will help you with anything you need!

Last night and this morning we spent rewriting, testing, tweaking, and benchmarking the post re-order code, which runs in the administration area quite frequently (any time an event that could change post order occurs), and we’ve reduced its load time for some users by a factor of 100 or more. The majority of users weren’t seeing any delays here, but those who had database servers sporting high per-query latencies did (such as those running databases on separate, networked servers). Things are lightning fast now.

What’s new?
So much – there has been over 2,000 changes and 800 marked revisions since 5.0 was released. MyReviewPlugin was largely overhauled for 6.0: we redid the WordPress integration type stuff entirely to be faster, more tightly integrated with the new WordPress backend theme (it looks a lot better!), etc. MyReviewPlugin was always the fastest plugin on the market, but now it is many times faster.

More or less everything users asked for between 5.0 and 6.0 has been done. MyReviewPlugin is all about user feature requests, so send yours my way. I have a list of things for 6.1 on the go already, in fact, as soon as I post this, I’m going to get down to work on it.

• In-script language modification. This is killer. You can change any string within MyReviewPlugin from right within the user interface. ANY word, phrase, sentence, anything. You can translate the whole back end (and front end) from right within the admin area now.
• Data tables. A new form of custom field tables that allows you to control their order, categorize your data fields, etc. This lets you render detailed product information in an easy to read, easy to manage format.
• New star rating modes. We now support non-5 or -10 star category types, such as three star, four star or even twelve star rating categories.
• Editor’s rating explanations. Want to attach a quick explanation of how or why you picked a certain rating to each rating category? You can now do that!
• Hiding rating categories. Control which rating categories appear where. Rating categories now have a complete permissions system that allows you to have editor’s only, user’s only, average only and other types of rating categories. Rating categories can appear in certain tables, but not other tables, as you wish.
• Title tag embed. Add rating information right to your title tag on post pages. With one click.
• Horizontal embeds. Where appropriate (the ratings form embed, etc.) you can now more tightly integrate with your themes with a single click, switching things that were once vertically embedded to be horizontal.
• Per-embed control of “average” and “editor’s” ratings. Control what data shows up where.
• Big Google Maps. This is really cool. You can have a Google Map that shows… say, on your homepage… the top 10 businesses in an area, with little pins and their rating data. Fully customizable. Total game changer in the local niche: map-based review sites, you can do it with MyReviewPlugin 6.
• Large (or small) stars anywhere.
• Change sort order per page-type. Category pages can sort differently than the homepage now.
• Hide the rating form from users who are no longer authorized to review (they’ve already submitted a rating, or aren’t logged in, depending on your settings)
• Hundreds of UI tweaks to make it more clear. Our beta testers say they’ve found MyReviewPlugin 6 even easier to use than previous versions (and it now has dozens of new features!).
• Literally thousands of other improvements. Minor and major.

Technical stuff?

• New API functions for easier integration with other plugins.
• myrp_fleft and myrp_fright locations no longer appear unless rating data exists on the given page.
• “Did you find this review helpful” no longer appears on non-rating posts.
• GravityForms (or really any other plugin) auxiliary plugin. I’ve created an accessory plugin for MyReviewPlugin which allows you to easily let other plugins write to rating categories. This means you can have GravityForms forms that create posts with editor’s ratings, rating categories selected, etc. This means user submitted products are now easy, automatic and awesome with GravityForms. Click here to read about GravityForms.
• Shortcodes no longer require checkboxes. That was silly anyway. The shortcodes are all always available, everywhere. (if you want to go back to the old behavior, you can change it in the Advanced Settings page)
• Automatic “stray ratings” detection. We’ve implemented a simple garbage collector that notices if your ratings database is out of sync. This means that any other plugin that’s causing odd behavior (deleting/adding its own comments, posts, etc.) is no longer an issue!
• SPEED. We did some more bottleneck analysis on different web hosts, different web server configurations, etc. and the few places that were holding MyReviewPlugin back in terms of speed have been dramatically improved. You’ll find MyReviewPlugin 6 is the fastest MyReviewPlugin yet.
• Comparison table shortcodes/API functions now support an offset parameter. This will allow you to grab posts 2-6 (or whatever, as you define) instead of 1-5, by, for example, specifying offset=1.

Yours truly,
Mark Edwards,
Lead developer of MyReviewPlugin.

* I say BETA, but it should be pretty stable at this point. About two dozen MyReviewPlugin users have been using SuperChartBoy for about a month now.

Good news though. It’s not gone. It’s just default hidden. At the top right of your screen, when you’re on the edit posts page, you’ll see two gray dropdown boxes. “Help” and “Screen Options” – if you are like most users, you probably never even noticed they were there. Click “Screen Options” and reenable the fields you want. If you’re looking to use MyRP Custom Field tables (or in the upcoming 6.0: Data Tables) make sure to turn of “Custom Fields”.

Speaking of 6.0, the core work is done (the new charts functionality, on the other hand, is still needing some CSS). I sent out a dozen beta copies last week, and I’m currently in the process of upgrading my own sites to it as a test. There are at least 15 websites running 6.0 at this point, which is a decent test-base. Of course, 6.0 will be a free, easy, one-step (just drop it in and reactivate) upgrade for all 5.0 owners.

But here’s the gotcha: in many modern themes, the comment_form hook occurs underneath the <input> tag which submits the form. This is why hen you use plugins that add fields to your comments form, you find that they are underneath the “post comment” button: rarely is this what you really want, but this is how many of the most popular themes are designed.

Luckily, there are many ways to fix this:

Option 1: Move the comment_form hook. If you open your theme’s comments.php file (go to Themes > Editor, and select the file on the right labeled comments.php), you will see the code that outputs the comments area. In “modern” style themes, a function called comment_form(…) is called to output the actual form, but in older themes, you’ll find the form, complete with >form< tags, and you’ll find a block that looks like this:

<?php do_action("comment_form"); ?>

This is where your MyRP comment form hooks are going to go, so cut that piece of code, and move it up to above the code that looks something like this:

<input type="submit" ... value="Post Comment" />

This will move the comment fields to be above the Post Comment button (if you want to put them somewhere else, such as above the Name field, or above the comment textarea, feel free to customize!)

Option 2: Hook one of the notes positions instead.

In newer themes, particularly one’s that the above method doesn’t work for, you’ll find code that looks like this (this is excerpted from the included WordPress theme Twenty-Eleven, but it is often already more complicated than this)

<?php comment_form(); ?>

This function is documented on the WordPress website, as taking a parameter in the first spot called $args. In simple terms, what that means is simply that you can tell it how to behave by creating an object that contains a set of parameters. There are two primary locations that you can use to output things in this $args array, one is called comment_notes_before and the other comment_notes_after.

So what we’re going to do, is call a MyReviewPlugin API function (MyReviewPlugin API, or MyRP/api/standard.php in your plugins files) called myrp_api_ratings_form_table. Most MyReviewPlugin API functions take two parameters, one that indicates the post ID (or null to use the current post) you wish to get the data for, and one that indicates whether to RETURN (allow it to be used in other code) or to ECHO (put it on the website right now) the data. In this case, we want to return, because we want to use it in the $args array mentioned above.

The code for this method then looks like (for the “comment_notes_before” option)…


<?php
$args = array("comment_notes_before" => myrp_api_ratings_form_table(null, true));
comment_form($args);
?>


Or, you can switch out comment_notes_before with comment_notes_after to use the other location:


<?php
$args = array("comment_notes_after" => myrp_api_ratings_form_table(null, true));
comment_form($args);
?>


Themes often manipulate their comment_forms to behave differently, so try both locations, see which one works best for you.

When you call API functions, like you are here, you will want to go to MyRP > Setup Embeds > Ratings in Comments in the WordPress administration area to make sure you turn off the automatic embeds. The MyRP online quickdocs have more information about API (manual) vs. automatic embeds.

Option 3: Just call the ratings form directly, with caveats. The third option (which is really a more general case of the above option), is simply to call the API call <?php myrp_api_ratings_form_table(); ?> where-ever you want the form. The caveat here is that it must appear after the <form> tag, but before the closing </form> tag in the comments field. If you can see the form tag in your comments.php, you can simply copy and paste the code anywhere in there.

Solving this problem for plugins that don’t provide an API function may not be as easy — you’ll want to look in to your theme’s functions.php file, to see if there’s somewhere that defines the comments form. If you can find that, you can use option 1 above to move the do_action call.

As always, if you have any trouble with any of that, feel free to submit a support ticket. We will not be able to help you via blog comments, so please do use the support system at tickets.myreviewplugin.com to get assistance!