We’ve been promising it forever and now we’re finally ready to unveil the all-new LouderVoice Wordpress plug-in V2.0. This enables you to write reviews on your blog using an open standard called hReview. Sites like LouderVoice can then index and interpret them more intelligently than raw blog-posts.
The new plug-in is a total re-write based on lots of user feedback and, in particular, some fantastic suggestions and guidance from Robin Blandford.
So what’s changed? Everything!
- It is compatible with Wordpress.org from V2.0.3 to the brand new V2.5
- It now integrates into the normal blog-post editor instead of being a pop-up
- The extra markup is no longer stored inline in the blog-post body so there is no danger of damaging the extra review information if you go back to edit a post
- We’ve dropped the summary field and just use the first paragraph of the body as the summary
- LouderVoice tags are optional, we can make use of tags from all the major tagging systems on Wordpress including the built-in one
- The plug-in pings LouderVoice when you post a new review. Indexing of new reviews should therefore be faster
- The rating stars are stored locally in the plug-in dir so you can easily change them to suit yourself
What hasn’t changed? It is still microformats compliant and it is still GPL, so hack away if you want to change anything.
A big thanks to John Blackbourn for all the development effort.
Download it from here and please let us know what you think. Heck, why not review it 
4 Comments
Nice one Conor!
I’ll get the v2 installed on the production version of TeamGearedUp.com tonight/tomorrow.
Excellent! If you grabbed it on Sunday afternoon Irish time, grab it again. First zip had the silly svn files still in it.
Ok - we’re live.
e.g. http://blog.teamgearedup.com/2008/04/princetontec.html
It would nice to be able to control the auto-header (stars/title). I know I can re-theme, but it would be cool to have them in the footer with the other text added. Thats where people will click away - they want to read the review first, then click the product link and see the rating - not navigate away before reading it.
-Robin.
Awesome!
Moving stars is easy for us to to do. We can have a quick try and see how it looks.
I know some of the ratings widgets are inserting JS into people’s posts so that it’s all server-side configurable, but I don’t know how comfortable I am with that (as a blogger).