If you used our previous plugin (Contestant Rating WordPress Plugin), you will be happy to learn that this new plugin is a great replacement.

1. Use shortcode to display your  ratings. We have incorporated the use of shortcode into the plugin so you are no longer required to edit your template.
   Because it was our first plugin, we did not have the vision to incorporate this in the first iterations. We have done our homework and thanks to the help of other great WordPress users, we have created methods to display the Five Star Rating plugin, ‘Best of the Month’ and ‘Best of the Moment’ using a simple shortcode.
2. You set the cookie.
   We did two bad things with the cookie in the first plugin. First we hardcoded it and second we set the expiration for one year in the future. Of course this worked for us, but we realize now that you might have other uses for the plugin. Therefore we have added the ability for you to set your own cookie expiration for as little as 1 minute to 12 hour to 365 days (or more if you like).
3. Make it your own.
   We originally ported over an existing WordPress plugin and that plugin had more then one look. Unfortunately we did not have the vision to plan for using more then one look. Well not anymore! We have added the ability to theme this plugin as you see fit (more instructions on how to do this will follow). Currently there are two themes, but we have added the flexibility into the plugin to allow you to theme it as you like. It is as simple as adding an attribute to your short code…. like this:

   [five-star-rating star_type="abuse"]

4. Help us keep improving.
   If you run into an issue, would like to request a feature or just want to tell us what a great plugin this is, be sure to post a note to us. Of course if you run into an issue, please don’t just say ‘It doesn’t work!’ or ‘This plugin sucks’ as 9 times out of 10 the plugin is working fine and as we intended, but the plugin is not being implemented correctly. We like criticism, but please make it constructive.

Here is the plugin in action. Rate this post!

Here are some stats for the month.

• Five Star Rating WordPress Plugin
  * * * ½   12 votes

  powered by Five Star Rating

We have more work to do as far as documentation and such, but this was just so exciting, we had to get it out now. More will follow in the future.

Download version 1.2 now

This is our first wordpress plugin and although we did not write this from scratch (we ported over a previous plugin that only worked in FireFox), we did improve upon a previous product and made it our own.

The plugin requires jQuery and if it is not included, it should load it for you. The most recent version is 0.4.

Download contestant-rating ver. 0.4[25 KB zip]

The original upload had the wrong /js/ files in it, so have updated the download here.

Download the latest version 2.1 of the plugin at http://showMessage.dingobytes.com/download/

Please see the site, as the information below is for previous versions. This has been updated!

This is my first attempt at a jQuery Plugin, so although it works fine for my liking, I am sure there are many things that can be done more effectively.

• Message displayed at the top of page (no scrolling to view error)
• Multiple messages can be displayed
• Options to automatically close the message after set delay
• Message closes with blur/’esc’ key/’close’ link

• Download
• Install
• Options
• Examples

<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/jquery.showMessage.min.js"
charset="utf-8"><\/script>

#showMessage li
{
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, clean, sans-serif;
font-size: large;
font-weight: bold;
color: red;
}

thisMessage:		[''],
backgroundColor:	'#F7F7F7',
color:			'#000000',
opacity:		90,
displayNavigation:	true,
autoClose:		false,
delayTime:		5000