Blog

Today we are pleased to announce our next major release for ExpressionEngine 3, Rating 4!

As mentioned previously with other add-on releases for EE3, we have been trying to clean up and smooth out the wrinkles in our add-ons for their EE3 compatible release. In Rating 4 specifically, you'll notice several changes and new things:

• IMPORTANT: Overhauled Rating Stars feature to be much more customizable. You can now specify an alternate directory on your site for where your Rating star images are located, adjust output size and set file type extension. Also included new set of default modern star images. This is exciting because you now have full control over your rating stars display, and also don't have to worry about overwriting your files on an update (since they can be located in your normal image assets directory).
• Added rating_status="" parameter to Rating:Rank template tag and status="" parameter to Rating:Stats template tag, which allows you to filter rating submissions by the status they're in.
• Added 'if rating_no_results' and 'if rating_comment_no_results' conditionals to Rating:Form and Rating:Comment_Form tags, respectively. This allows you to display an error message to users that do not have sufficient member group privileges to post ratings or rating comments. <- Modified Rating:Form template tag to update and calculate average rating stats for all statuses except "closed", as a performance option. Previously, it used to exclude "Pending" and "Declined" statuses as well - these are no longer reserved statuses. More information about this here.
• Updated language throughout Rating control panel area to be clearer, and updated and enhanced moderation controls in Rating control panel.
• IMPORTANT: Removed 'if first_rating' conditional/feature from Rating:Form and Rating:Entries template tags. We believe that this is a rarely used feature, and this can mostly be accomplished with use of 'if duplicate' / 'if not_duplicate' conditionals in Rating:Form. The {first_rating} variable continues to exist in Rating:Entries, and will parse as the numeric rating submitted for the first rating the user submitted for the given entry (if multiple ratings are submitted).
• IMPORTANT: Removed timeframe range searching on Rating:Rank template tag. We believe this was a rarely used feature, but may consider adding it back in a future release.
• IMPORTANT: Removed Ratings export feature in Rating control panel. We believe this was a rarely used feature, but may consider adding it back in a future release.

Some Important Information about our EE3 releases

We have decided that all EE3 converted add-ons will ONLY work with ExpressionEngine 3+ (if you've been around long enough, you'll remember that we managed to have a single code base work for both EE1 and EE2 back when EE2 was released). The EE2 versions of our add-ons will remain "feature-frozen", except for critical and security fixes. An EE2 compatible version will be available inside of the EE3 compatible download package. We know that many customers will have to wait until there is enough critical mass of third party add-on availability before they can begin using EE3 in the real world, so for the next 6-12 months, a new purchase or upgrade of EE3 compatible add-ons will also include an EE2 compatible version. You can use the EE2 compatible version until you're ready to upgrade to ExpressionEngine 3.x.

Due to the large amount of time involved with updating and testing our add-ons for EE3 compatibility, there will be an upgrade fee associated with each. Rating in particular is $29.95 to upgrade. Buying upgrades can be done in your Account area. Customers that purchased a Solspace add-on up to 3 months before release of the EE3 compatible version will receive an automatic free upgrade. Rating 3.x customers from the past 3 months have already received this.