The first style set we’ll look at is the rating section, which shows how many votes have been made and the ratings given.

Reviews also come with built-in styles, and look like this:

Lastly, the review form itself has some styles added:

Disabling Styles

If you prefer to make your own CSS styles for Product Reviews, go to Downloads → Extensions → Reviews and find the checkbox labeled Disable EDD Reviews CSS.

When this is checked, none of the default styles for Product Reviews will load.

Note: you may still see some styling of the forms since many themes come with form styling built in.

The post Reviews – Styles first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

Setup

First, create a page with this shortcode on it: [edd_commissions] Feel free to make the page private or password protected if desired.

The shortcode will print several blocks of information:

• Unpaid Commissions
• Paid Commissions
• Revoked Commissions

Here’s a very simple example of the Paid Commissions block:

Vendor Reports

There are shortcodes available to present reports to your vendors. See Commissions – Reports for a list of the shortcodes and examples.

Exporting

Vendors can export a CSV file that contains Product, Amount, and Date using the Commissions extension. Note that this is different from exporting the store’s CSV file, which contains data for all vendors. The export referenced in this document is for individual vendors, NOT for the entire store.

At the bottom of this page you’ll find a small form that looks like this:

Select a month and year, then press the Download CSV button. When you open the resulting file in a spreadsheet application, it should look similar to this:

The post Commissions – Vendor Account Page & Export first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

FAQ and Troubleshooting:

Do users need to be logged in in order to post a review?
If the Reviews setting “Enable Guest Reviews” is checked, any visitor can leave a review.

Can I change where Reviews are shown on the page?
By default reviews will be shown directly beneath the “content” (which is the main text area of your product). You cannot move them without doing some custom development in your theme. Note that custom development isn’t provided by Easy Digital Downloads; please visit our Codeable page for more details on customizing EDD and/or the Reviews extension.

Does the Reviews Extension integrate with Google Reviews?
The Reviews extension automatically integrates with Google’s search results so your search results with product listings will show the review data.

The post Reviews – FAQ and Troubleshooting first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

Overview

In the above screenshot, there are three reviews listed. Each row contains:

• The name of the reviewer
• Their email address
• The content of their review
• What Download the review pertains to with a link to that download and the number of reviews that exist for it
• The date the review was created

Note: In the screenshot above, the first item says “In reply to Bob”. That row is not considered a Review, but rather a reply to a review. The link on Bob’s name goes to the reply on the public facing product page.

Managing/Approving Reviews

Sidenote about Review statuses: Reviews will require (or not require) approval the same way general WordPress comments do. You can control whether WordPress comments require approval under Dashboard → Settings → Discussion → “Before a comment appears”. Whatever you choose there will also be used for EDD Reviews. 

If you hover over any reviewer information, you’ll see the options to Unapprove, Edit, Spam, or Trash. All reviews are sent through the same filters WordPress uses for comments, and the status will be set accordingly. Marking a review as Unapproved removes it from the front of the site, but does not delete the review.

Marking a review as Spam puts it into the Spam folder, and marking it as Trash puts it into the Trash folder, just like comments or posts.

Editing allows you to change the name, email, url, and content of the review. You may also change the status to Approved, Pending, or Spam, and also Trash the review.

Download Admin Page

On the admin page for each individual Download, you may close or disable reviews for that specific Download. In the right sidebar you’ll find a meta box titled Review Status with a button for Disabling and a button for Closing. Disabling reviews will not show any reviews whatsoever. Closing reviews will display any existing reviews, but prevent new reviews from being submitted.

Additionally, on single Download admin pages you can manage all the reviews for that Download. You can view, unapprove, edit, spam, and trash any review. it also shows how many stars the Download got for each review.

The post Reviews – Administration first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

EDD Featured Review

This widget allows you to select a single review from any Download and show it in a widget. Here’s a screenshot of the admin interface:

The output includes the widget title, review title, reviewer name, product title, review full text, and the date of the review.

EDD Reviews

This widget renders recent reviews.  You may provide a number to limit how many reviews display. Admin screenshot:

The output lists the name of the reviewer and a link to the the download.

EDD Per Product Reviews

This widget is similar to EDD Reviews but only renders reviews for a single Download, and only shows on the page for that Download. Admin interface:

The output shows all reviews for the Download (or the number you chose, if you entered one) and contains the number of stars in the review, the title of the review, and the name of the reviewer.

The post Reviews – Widgets first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

Enabling vendor feedback

When you install the Reviews extension, if you already have Frontend Submissions installed, the installation procedure will automatically create a Vendor Feedback page with the content set as [edd_reviews_vendor_feedback] which is a WordPress Shortcode. This shortcode displays the vendor feedback form when a user visits the page.

If you install Frontend Submissions after Reviews has been activated, you will need to manually create the Vendor Feedback page:

1. Create a new page from the WordPress Dashboard
2. Set your title accordingly (e.g. Vendor Feedback)
3. Set the content as [edd_reviews_vendor_feedback]
4. Visit Downloads → Settings → Reviews and set the Vendor Feedback Page to the one you just created.

Providing vendor feedback

Once Vendor Feedback has been correctly configured, links will automatically appear on the Purchase History page.

If customers buy a vendor’s product, they can leave feedback for the vendor. A link will be displayed on the customer’s Purchase History, which they can follow to supply feedback to the vendor. Links will only appear for products created by a vendor.

The Vendor Feedback page will look something like this:

Viewing vendor feedback

If you have the manage_shop_settings capability, you can view all the Vendor Feedback provided by navigating to EDD FES → Vendor Feedback from the WordPress dashboard.

On that page, you will see a table displaying all the feedback:

From here, you have the ability to apply similar actions to that of WordPress comments whereby you can unapprove, trash, or mark feedback as spam.

From the frontend, your vendors can see all feedback given to them by navigating to their Vendor Dashboard and clicking on the Vendor Feedback tab. The difference between the admin page and the frontend page is that the admin pages shows all feedback, while the frontend page only shows feedback specific to the vendor currently logged in.

The post Reviews – FES Integration first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

Enable review breakdown

If you see a product with an average rating of 5 stars, you may think “This is great!” But what if it’s only been reviewed once or twice? The rating may not be quite as meaningful. If there are 4.7 stars out of 500 reviews, the value of the rating is much higher. Enable Review Breakdown renders the number of votes with the reviews so the reader can properly evaluate the worth of the stars.

Disable multiple reviews by same author

If one person is allowed to create multiple reviews, the value of the ratings becomes diluted, and one person can dominate the tone of the reviews. This option prevents single users from leaving multiple reviews of the same product.

Disable voting on reviews

If you don’t care about rankings or voting or stars, you may simply turn off that feature with this option. Reviews will continue to be available; they just won’t have a ranking attached.

Only allow reviews by buyers

If it’s important to you that only people who actually experienced your product leave reviews then you can use this option to allow only those who have purchased the product to leave a review. 

Word Counts

A three-word review doesn’t convey much information. By the same token, a 1500-word review might be better served by its own blog post somewhere else. If you’d like to try to maintain a relative average length, you can use the Minimum word count and Maximum word count fields.

Discounts

You may offer a percentage discount in your store to anyone who leaves a review. Enable Reviewer Discount will activate this option, and then you may use the Reviewer Discount Amount field to set the discount amount.

Disable EDD Reviews CSS

This removes all built-in Reviews CSS, and allows you to style the plugin output any way you wish.

The post Reviews – Settings first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

Note: The shortcode only allows you to show product reviews, it does not allow the user to submit reviews. That can only be done via the Download (or Product) page.

The shortcode looks like this:

[review id="REVIEW_ID"]

The easiest way to embed a review is to use the Insert Review button above the classic content editor.

Pressing the Insert Review button will open a modal window. The modal will display a dropdown of all reviews; select the one you want and press Insert Review.

This will render a shortcode like the one mentioned at the top of the article.

If you use the Gutenberg or block editor for your pages and posts, we recommend inserting a shortcode block, then adding the shortcode manually.

Output

A shortcode like this will look like the screenshot below on the page:

The review will show the review title, author, download title, the review itself, the date of the review, and a link to the review.

Displaying multiple reviews

Other parameters can be passed to the [review] shortcode to allow you to display multiple reviews at a time.  A shortcode to display multiple reviews looks like this:

[review download="DOWNLOAD_ID" multiple="true" number="10"]

The above shortcode will display 10 reviews for a given download ID.

The post Reviews – Shortcodes first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

The EDD REST API provides an endpoint called /reviews/. The reviews endpoint allows you to query the database and retrieve a list of reviews placed on all products from your store. A basic reviews query looks like this:

http://yoursite.com/edd-api/reviews/?key=c281cf0a95be875d9eeb284fb004c938&token=5f9432f3ffa5945755ebc66179810d70

For each review returned, you’ll receive the following information:

• id – The unique ID of the review
• title – The title of the review
• parent – If the review is a reply, this gives the ID of the parent review
• download_id – The ID of the download for which this review was created
• download_title – Title of the download for which this review was created
• rating – The rating given by the reviewer. This will be null for a reply.
• author – The name of the author of the review
• email – The email address of the author of the review
• IP – The IP address from which the review was submitted
• date – The date the review was submitted
• date_gmt – The date (in GMT) the review was submitted
• content – The content of the review
• status – The status of the review. 1 represents approved and 0 represents unapproved (pending). The status can also be “spam” or “trash”
• user_id – The WordPress user ID of the review author
• type – Either a review or reply depending on what it is
• votes – The number of people who have voted that this review is helpful or unhelpful. This will be null for a reply. If this is a review, it will have sub-keys of yes and no

A reviews query response looks like this:

{
    "reviews": {
        "total": "2",
        "most_recent": [
            {
                "id": "63",
                "title": null,
                "parent": "60",
                "download_id": "1568",
                "download_title": "Endless Possibilities",
                "rating": null,
                "author": "Sunny Ratilal",
                "email": "dev@local.dev",
                "IP": "172.17.0.1",
                "date": "2016-07-20 17:24:48",
                "date_gmt": "2016-07-20 17:24:48",
                "content": "Replying to test review",
                "status": "1",
                "user_id": "1",
                "type": "reply",
                "votes": null
            },
            {
                "id": "61",
                "title": "Great read",
                "parent": "0",
                "download_id": "1566",
                "download_title": "eBook",
                "rating": "4",
                "author": "Sunny Ratilal",
                "email": "dev@local.dev",
                "IP": "172.17.0.1",
                "date": "2016-07-19 19:25:22",
                "date_gmt": "2016-07-19 19:25:22",
                "content": "Well written book",
                "status": "1",
                "user_id": "1",
                "type": "review",
                "votes": {
                    "yes": "3",
                    "no": "0"
                }
            },
        ]
    },
    "request_speed": 0.08372688293457
}

Certain query variables can be attached to the base query. If you want to receive the data for a single review, you can add the &review_id={identifier} parameter, like this:

http://yoursite.com/edd-api/reviews/?key=c281cf0a95be875d9eeb284fb004c938&token=5f9432f3ffa5945755ebc66179810d70&review_id=61

The response for a single review looks like this:

{
    "reviews": {
        "id": "61",
        "title": "Great read",
        "parent": "0",
        "download_id": "1566",
        "download_title": "eBook",
        "rating": "4",
        "author": "Sunny Ratilal",
        "email": "dev@local.dev",
        "IP": "172.17.0.1",
        "date": "2016-07-19 19:25:22",
        "date_gmt": "2016-07-19 19:25:22",
        "content": "Well written book",
        "status": "1",
        "user_id": "1"
    },
    "request_speed": 0.0022079944610596
}

If you want to view all the reviews for a single download, you can add the &download_id={identifier} parameter, like this:

http://yoursite.com/edd-api/reviews/?key=c281cf0a95be875d9eeb284fb004c938&token=5f9432f3ffa5945755ebc66179810d70&download_id=1568

The above query will generate a response similar to above but will have multiple sub-keys under the reviews key

The post Reviews – REST API first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

Please see the extension installation instructions if needed.

2. Settings

The settings for this plugin can be found under Downloads > Settings > Marketing > Reviews

You have the option to Enable the Review Breakdown, which displays a fully formatted element above the reviews section showing how many people have voted for each star.

In the Styles section, you have the option of disabling the CSS that comes with the plugin. The CSS styles certain elements which provide some form of compatibility with your existing theme. (Note: the CSS provided by the plugin does _not_ provide 100% theme compatibility and changes may have to be made). The CSS provided styles the reviews and the review breakdown.

3. Widgets

The plugin comes with three widgets: Featured Review, EDD Reviews, and EDD Per Product Reviews.

3.1 Featured Review

The Featured Review widget allows you to select a review and display it. The widget can be found under Appearance → Widgets.

a. Drag the Featured Review widget to the widget area where you want it to display
b. Select a review from the dropdown list
c. Click the Save Changes button

3.2 EDD Reviews

The EDD Reviews widget allows you display recent reviews that have been made on the site, similar to the WordPress Recent Comments widget. The widget can be found under Appearance → Widgets.

a. Drag the EDD Reviews widget to the widget area where you want it to display
b. Enter the number of reviews you wish to display
c. Click the Save Changes button

3.3 EDD Per Product Reviews

The EDD Per Product Reviews widget allows you to display reviews for a single Download. This widget only displays on the single Download view.

a. Drag the EDD Per Product Reviews widget to the widget area where you want it to display (must be a widget area that displays on single downloads)
b. Enter the number of reviews you wish to display, or leave the field blank to display all
c. Click the Save Changes button

4. Viewing Reviews for a Product

Every review can be seen by navigating to Downloads → Reviews.

Each review can be edited if needed, as well as replied to from this screen.

5. Emails

There are several email options to message the store owner and/or customer under Downloads > Emails.

Review Notification: Email to store owner when a customer submits a review
Reviewer Discount: Provide a customer with a discount code for submitting a review.
Request a Review: Schedule emails to send out, after a successful order, to request a review. (ie Immediately, Next Day, 1 Week, etc)

Email Tag

You can also use the {review_request} tag in the Purchase Receipt.

See the email settings for details on editing emails.

6. Shortcode

The Review plugin has a shortcode that can be used to embed reviews within your theme. The structure of the shortcode is as follows:

[review id="REVIEW_ID"]

The REVIEW_ID should be replaced with the review ID. You can locate the Review ID by navigating to Downloads → Reviews and editing a Review. In the address bar of your browser (where URL appears), you will see the following in the URL: “page=edd-reviews&r=XX” where “XX” is the Review ID.

This will embed a fully formatted element in your post/page displaying the review looking like this:

6. Styling

The Reviews extension has been designed to integrate as much as possible with the default WordPress Comments output, so if your theme has styling applied for comments, reviews will most likely look like your comments do on blog posts. The plugin does come with styling, though, so the Review Title and the Rating render correctly.

The post Reviews – Initial Setup first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.