Working With Reviews & Ratings : Widgets

Our Schema Reviews & Ratings system is a very feature rich system you can use to collect & display reviews and/or ratings on your websites. Because we want to provide you with full flexibility of all the available features, there are a lot of settings to understand. This set of articles will outline them for you.

We have two main options that both present unique ways of collecting and displaying reviews and/or ratings from your site. Widgets or Shortcodes.

This article will cover Widgets!

Typically you will use the Widget (vs Shortcodes) option when you want to collect and/or display reviews sitewide anywhere your widgets are on disaplay which is typically the sidebar, but can also include footers or header widgets depening on the theme you use. However, we have given you the ability to use widgets, but only hide or show them on specific pages.

Within your standard Appearance >> Widgets Wordpress menu item, you'll notice that we have two widgets available for you to use.

Use this to collect reviews!

Using this widget will display the Review Box that will allow your website to collect reviews from your visitors. By default this widget will display & function according to the settings you have configured in your Xagio Plugin under:

Xagio >> Reviews >> Customize.

Within the Review Widget, you'll have access to the following configurations.

Alpha Mode - When checked, the Alpha Mode will strip all background settings from your review collection box to allow your widget to blend better with your themes sidebar design settings.

Popup Mode - When Popup Mode is checked, only the "SUBMIT YOUR REVIEW" button is displayed instead of the entire review box. Once the button is clicked the full review box will show as a pop up. This is simply a way to be more space efficient on your site.

Widget Ratings Mode - When this button is checked, the function of the widget changes from a review (full written review) to a rating (stars only). This is especially beneficial to Schema properties such as "Article, Recipe or Blog Post" where a rating of the item is more appropriate than a written review.

Display Type | Posts & Pages - This functionality gives you the ability to SHOW or HIDE the sidebar widget on specific pages or posts. Chose the display type of either "hide" or "show", and then select the pages or posts you wish to apply the setting to.

*A list of all your websites pages and/or posts will be displayed by type in a separate box.

Use this to display reviews!

By default this widget will diplsay all collected reviews & function according to the settings you have configured in your PSv3 Plugin under:

Xagio >> Reviews >> Customize.

Within the Display Reviews widget, you'll have access to the following configurations.

Limited Displayed Reviews - This allows you to control the number of reviews you wish to display. Super useful if you have collected many reviews and space on your website is limited.

Display Random Reviews - When you have limited the amount of reviews displayed, you can check this setting to have random reviews displayed each page load.

Display Aggregate Rating - When you have this box checked, you can also display your total aggregate rating (a summation of all reviews) above your reviews.

Display Type - This functionality gives you the ability to SHOW or HIDE the sidebar widget on specific pages or posts. Chose the display type of either "hide" or "show", and then select the pages and/or posts you wish to apply the setting to.

*A list of all your websites pages and posts will be displayed by type in a separate box.