How to make product ratings better

[ma...@cuthemustard.com]

Help! I am trying to make the current satchmo_ext.productratings app better, but I am unsure what direction to take. Anyone have any ideas or have already worked on this on their own end?

[Darren Hollenbeck]

I've looked at it but have not yet pursued making changes (https://groups.google.com/d/topic/satchmo-users/LfWKxw1V8yU/discussion)

I'd recommend a search of both the user and dev group here for posts related to the app, then if you're going to pursue it, ask Chris or Hy about it.

[ma...@cuthemustard.com]

I've looked at both the groups and it seems like there is a good amount of people acknowledging that there is a problem with productratings. So I guess now is as good a time as any to start thinking up ideas to make it better.

[ma...@cuthemustard.com]

One direction we could go towards: Instead of piggy-backing on django.contrib.comments and relying on its signals to save ProductRating instances, perhaps productratings should have its own forms.py and views.py.

Could the ProductRatingForm be a child of the CommentForm?

For the views: perhaps an ObjectRating view for validation/processing of the form an we could provide an ajax version as well.

I don't know. I'm going to start hacking. Pleases post any ideas. :)

[Darren Hollenbeck]

Personally I think ratings should not be linked to comments. It would make the productratings app simpler, and also allow for some changes to the way the comments system currently works. Making the rating work like "most sites" would improve it a lot as well - what I mean is that a site user should be able to click on an icon or graphic of some sort which indicates their rating choice (and use AJAX to post it so they aren't pulled away from the product page). The site developer can provide the look and feel of the widget, if they want different than a provided default.

Comments can be tied in using django comments by the site developer (separate from the productratings app) or whatever method they want. Heck, people could install Disqus to use as their comments system. No reason for it to be integrated into this app, the way I see it.