Thread

Hi I have a site that I need to build and I’m evaluating if Expression engine is up to the job. Essentially the site is a ratings site with some unique requirements.

Our product ratings will require the user to choose 1-5 stars on a bunch of performance criteria (common on ratings sites). In addition to this, they will also need choose from a predefined list of attributes for the following criteria (What surface was the product used on and what problem were you trying to treat)

When a user enters the site they will need to be able to search for product reviews based on the two attributes above. Upon completing a search, we want to display users a list of products where ratings exist for a product used on the surface and target problem in their search.  When the user selects a product we want to show them the average rating and individual ratings for those product under those conditions.

Any feedback on if and how this would be achieved would be great.

Cheers

There are a few ratings add-ons, and sounds like you might need Solspace’s Super Search, but otherwise I see nothing that says don’t use EE.

Solspace’s Rating module should take care of the rating aspects of the proposed site, including all the different criteria that you want to rate the products on.

Essentially, think of each product as a channel entry, then the attributes of each review (the star ratings, plus the criteria from pre-defined lists) can be coded as custom fields in the Rating module.

For the pre-defined lists, you can set these up as entries in hidden channels which are used to load as values in select menus and are stored as text custom fields in Rating.

Unfortunately Solspace’s Rating module doesn’t work with their Super Search module so you’ll have to figure out a way of searching for the criteria that you want visitors to be able to filter on, but it should certainly be doable.