[gd-star-rating:106] social media such as Facebook's new Like button and Huffington Post's new badges pose a challenge to the old star rating system

[Jim]

Hi,

I'd encourage you to consider how you can upgrade gd-star-rating to
incorporate or compete with the new social media rating tools
developed by Facebook (the Like button) and Huffington Post (badges).
Various user/commenter karma systems have been around for a long time
and are being enhanced and increasingly used, especially on media
websites. But I think what Facebook is doing takes this to a new
level and the Huffington Post badge system is both new and quite
ingenious. It's easy to incorporate the Like system in your rating
system, and there are already a number of Wordpress plugins that
integrate the Like button into posts and comments. The various karma
systems, including the new system devised by the Huffington Post,
represent a very different and more challenging model. The star
rating system is certainly not going to go away, as evidenced by
Google's and Yahoo's endorsement of the five star product review
ontology, which is now ubiquitous in its search results. The bottom
line is that the social rating ecosystem seems to be getting much more
complex. I hope gd-star-rating stays at the forefront of this
movement.

--J.H. Snider, iSolon.org

P.S. On your new theme business, I hope you won't go too far down the
Woo Themes route of introducing many but poorly supported themes.
This is clearly a good short term business strategy, but I think in
the long term Woo will alienate its users and lose out to developers
who continue to refine their products with tender loving care.

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[MillaN]

Hi Jim,

Well, I am following the trends with ratings, and I am currently
working for a client that also use some variation of like rating
system. And GDSR will follow what's going on, but will offer much more
to users and will cover all the rating systems in use with added user
bonus/karma system. I have still ways to go with GDSR 2.0 due to other
projects that actually pay bills, but I can promise that GDSR 2.0 will
be great and very powerful plugin that will surely be only rating
system you need for WordPress/BuddyPress.

As for the themes I like WooThemes, but as of late they are in the
hyper production mode with so many themes I can keep track of them. My
idea is to centralize as much code as I can into the framework, and
right now framework contains 80% of the code, and theme needs only the
rest 20%. This minimizes problems down the road with upgrades, mixed
features, and the themes are what they supposed to be: different
design with functionalities as users need them. My plan is to release
1 or 2 themes each month and after 7-8 completed themes to continue
with one theme each month. It's no problem releasing more, but with
creating too many themes, released themes don't get proper atention by
the users. And the framework is made so that it will require as little
changes to the code as possible. Chaning the code non stop by the user
create upgrade problems, so I tried to make control panels flexible,
to offer many options for layout and content. And since I offer auto
update of all premium themes and plugins, the process of installing
and using the theme, and upgrading when needed is very easy and
straight forward.

I would like to know what do you think about xScape themes and if you
have any suggestion on improving it. You can sign for free demo blog
where you can test premium themes and plugins: http://xscape.info/

Regards,
Milan

[Jim]

I think the auto install will give you a great leg up on Woo Themes
with mass market users. I hate manual installs. Thus, although Woo
Themes has created a half dozen very minor updates since I installed
their theme, I have not installed a single one of their updates. My
guess is that Woo Themes will eventually exploit Wordpress's new theme
upload, automatic update feature. But I found it very annoying month
after month after the new upload feature came out to try to
automatically update my Woo Theme, only to find that that option was
incompatible with Woo Themes.

I look forward to trying the demo of xScape, and I am very pleased
that you plan to integrate Buddypress into your theme and suite of
plugins.

--J.H. Snider

[MillaN]

It's interesting that I got few comments about my themes not being
developer friendly. Themes don't have usual structure WordPress themes
have, but even with that, design is divided in more logical elements
and separated from code as much as possible. And the fact that most
WordPress users are not developers, and would rather have everything
in control panel and to make changes in the theme code, I think that
it's more important to make themes as much usable for them than
developers. Every Woo theme (and not only Woo, I used StudioPress,
Thesis and ElegantThemes to mention few) I used I had to make hundreds
of changes to make it work what I need, and the same thing can be done
with my themes without changing single line of code. And I also
couldn't update any of their themes, because once you start changing
things, there is no way to upgrade without breaking something. And I
think that will be very important to end users: no coding needed, and
auto updates with great number of features built in.

Regards,
Milan