As the name suggests, WordPress Review Plugins enables you to quickly and effortlessly put good looking reviews on your wordpress enabled websites. In this review we are going to compare two of the best wordpress review plugins providers out there wpReviewSite and wpReviewEngine. (ReviewOfWeb tried contacting MyReviewPlugin folks but the queries went unanswered, hence it is not included in the review]
As always, we will try to bring an unbiased opinion for the two products so that readers can take an informed decision before choosing to purchase a wordpress review plugin.
For the purpose of this review we have purchased two brand new domains Email AutoResponders Reviews and WordPress Membership Site Reviews. After a quick wordpress install, we installed wpReviewEngine on Email AutoResponders Reviews and wpReviewSite on WordPress Membership Site Reviews. Here is a detailed comparison and review for both these plugins
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| Domains Installed | Email AutoResponders Reviews | WordPress Membership Site Reviews |
| Files Included |
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| Ease of Install | Quick. You need to upload the first 3 folders above and activate them and then upload the themes folder | Quick. Need to upload wpReviewSite, theme folder and optionally wprs-my-ratings plugin |
| Ease Of Use | Good for noobs. Easy to follow instructions available. | Good for noobs. Easy to follow instructions available. (They hand hold you with detailed screenshots to install the plugin) |
| Quick images Feature | Simply include the URL of the site under review and you get thumbnail from Thumbshots.com. | Not really. You can insert a link to an image which you have already uploaded on your server. |
| Affiliate Link | Dedicated box to provide an affiliate link for site under review. Thumbshot and “visit site” link is automatically linked if you fill this box. | Dedicated box to provide an affiliate link for site under review.“Visit Site” link is automatically linked if you fill this box. |
| Rating Categories – You can create your own rating categories. They can be applied per “wordpress category” or for all posts/pages |
Yes |
Yes |
| hReview support Good to have feature to “stand out” in Google results. |
Yes |
Not Available |
| Post Sorting Options |
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| 3rd party theme support | Yes, using “Auto embedding” option. | Yes, using plugin settings |
| Auto comment generation – Allows you to automatically generate comments
(Well, personally we stay clear of using such features on our sites.) |
Yes. | Not Available |
| Affiliate URL cloaking – Use this to hide those ugly looking affiliate links | Support included with Linkcloaker plugin ( at no extra cost) | Not Available |
| CSV To WordPress – Use this to quickly fill your site with entries from your database | Support included with CSV2WP plugin ( at no extra cost) | Not Available |
| Google Maps Support – In case reviewing a business, you can show its location using Google Maps |
Yes. Goes one level up to include a US zip code radius search |
Yes |
| Cost |
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| Discount? Follow these exact steps to avail discount. |
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Not Available |
ReviewOfWeb’s View
Both plugins are just fine if you are looking for a basic review system in your wordpress enabled website.
However, we see wpReviewEngine folks have done a great job of including many helpful features to make reviewers life easy. Also, wpReviewEngine plugin has many more customization options available when compared to wpReviewSite. Given the good set of features, ease of customizations and nearly the same cost our vote goes to wpReviewEngine plugin
Over to readers, have you tried any of the plugins listed above? How would you rate them?
PS: Thanks Bob and Dan for agreeing to face the challenge.
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Accessing your WordPress-powered admin panel from your mobile phones may seem impossible — or at least hard to do — a couple of years ago, but with the help of native WordPress for iPhone apps managing and maintaining your site on-the-go will be as easy as it can possibly get.
IPhone users now enjoy the luxury of being able to maintain their blog on-the-go with the help of WordPress for iPhone. The latest version (2.1) allows you to create posts, upload photos, edit pages, and manage comments on your blog from your iPhone or iPod touch.
The user interface of WordPress for iPhone is extremely intuitive, allowing you to access features with a few simple touches. Uploading photos, even photo-blogging extensively, will not be a problem at all because the app integrates nicely to iPhone’s camera and multimedia features.
Categories and tags as well as old posts and media will be accessible as well; they are streamed to you as soon as you configure your app. Since the WordPress for iPhone works for both self-hosted WordPress platform as well as free WordPress.com blogs, so you will have no problem at all configuring the app to work with your site. It supports SSL-encrypted connection for streaming data, so you wouldn’t have to worry about security issues at all.
The WordPress for iPhone 2.1 is now available on iTunes. You can also install the app on your iPod Touch, so get your copy right away.
Building a site is so much easier these days with the help of CMS and blogging platforms. Among these platforms, WordPress is used by a lot of site for all the right reasons; it offers superb flexibility with user friendly interface, making building and maintaining your site a lot easier. If you are using WordPress for your site and you are looking for a nice theme to use, you should really consider Thesis Theme for WordPress. Thesis Theme for WordPress may not look much out of the box — design-wise that is — but its powers are hidden under its hood. By far, Thesis Theme for WordPress is the most flexible theme with a lot of optimization and efficiency options to boost your site’s performance. You can easily customize Thesis Theme for WordPress’s design to suit your needs and wants; Thesis’s wordpress dashboard options allows you to change the structure of theme at a click of a button, without even meddling with the code. The Thesis Theme for WordPress also excels when it comes to SEO features and its ability to display information-rich HTML quickly. Site owners who are using Thesis as their WordPress theme also stated their satisfaction to the theme. Several testimonials can be found at Thesis’s testimonial page confirming how easy it is to use Thesis to build and maintain a site, including this one:
What an adventure. I literally did not know a single thing about blogging or WordPress two months ago. I’ve lurked on here for awhile and picked up the coding knowledge I needed. Thanks for the (affordable!) design and amazing functionality. — Michael | ICM-Bot.com
The Thesis option panel is designed to help you control aspects of your site easily even when you have no coding skills. The developer of Thesis Theme for WordPress also made changing the structure of Thesis that much and can be done from WordPress’s Dashboard. The level of design customization is virtually endless; you can see showcases of customizations made by other users to see the limitless potential of Thesis Theme for WordPress. Plus, you will also enjoy the built-in drop-down menu other added features that will surely make your site a lot more enjoyable. Thesis Theme for WordPress will make creating and maintaining your site that much easier.
Personally, I have used Thesis on a couple of blogs of mine and I can’t ask for more. The internal SEO in the theme has made by Google rankings soar by atleast 60 % within 1.5 months of installing the theme on my blog.
- See the Thesis Demo
- See killer customizations from the Thesis community
- Buy Thesis Theme Now!
Update: Check out our latest huge discount offer on Thesis Theme. (That’s a $36 discount – the highest discount available for Thesis.)
Check the video demo in action below:
Yesterday while trying to update my gocodes plugin, I got into this situation. As soon as I clicked on “Automatically update your plugin” link placed inside the plugins tab in wordpress, I noticed, I was not able to access plugins menu or tools menu from my admin panel and all my clicks were getting redirected to the blog itself.
What can you do to resolve this kind of situation?
It’s actually quite simple than you think.
- Go to your wordpress file server. (Place where you have your wordpress installation)
- Delete the ‘gocodes’ folder (or plugin folder that created problem for you at the first place) from inside the plugins folder present under wp-content >> plugins.
- Get hold of the the earlier version of the plugin and place it there.
- Now activate this plugin under wordpress panel .
- You will see all your menus working again.
Akismet is a proven way to prevent comment spam in wordpress powered blogs. It does a great job of sifting spam comments and redirecting them to the spam folder.
There is still a problem with this. Though spam get redirected to the appropriate folder but it unnecessarily clogs our MYSQL database. Moreover there is always a chance that among the hundreds of spam comments there is one good comment and unknowingly you might end up deleting that good comment as well, while cleaning up the folder.
I did some analysis on my spam comments (wordpress dashboard > comments > spam) and found that they mostly originate from 2-3 common IP’s. If I can get some way to automatically delete comments coming through those IP’s my problem would be partially solved(other spammers would still be there…grrr).
Here is a simple SQL script I wrote to do this:
DELETE FROM `wp_comments`
where `comment_author_IP` = ’66.159.18.9′ OR
`comment_author_IP` = ’84.19.188.218′;
Keep on adding the spammers IP’s that you see from your wordpress dashboard.
Now you can set up a cron job that runs every night or every week or every fortnight (depending on your requrements). All your spam comments would get deleted automatically at a given interval.
Gozar!
Here, I would like to share my experience of finding and setting up my blog on my web hosting service provider.
1) Choosing the host:
Since the start of my blogging activities I have followed Digitalpoint Forums religiously, which in a way have immensely helped me in choosing my blog host. I found the reviews for dreamhost web hosting more or less good all over. With features like 500 GB of disk storage on sign up increasing by 2GB every week, 5TB monthly bandwidth increasing by 40 GB every week, one free domain, unlimited domains and subdomains (that can be hosted), very less outage time. It took me no time to choose this as my preferred choice of Web Host.I registered with dreamhost on 11/Dec/07, luckily that was the last day when they allowed $97 discount for the new members. Now the maximum discount offered by them is $50.
2) WordPress Installation:
Within half an hour of subscribing and making payments, I received emails detailing about email and FTP services. Then came wordpress installation part, dreamhost offers a very simple ‘one click installation’ for wordpress(along with other installation options like forums). This can be done either in the root folder eg: ReviewOfWeb.com or you can create a wordpress folder of your own for eg: ReviewOfWeb.com/wordpress. Unless you intend to put your blog itself at the subdomain level, I would suggest you to stick with root folder only and not a seperate wordpress folder ( because of some security issues that comes along with it)
3) Choosing theme:
WP provides a number of built-in themes( through the presentation tab) or through http://themes.wordpress.net/. Other than these, you can get zillions of themes for a google search on “wp themes”. I suggest if you are a newbie to blogging stick with themes provided by WP, they are tested for IE, Firefox layout and other possible problem areas.
4) FTP client or Web Ftp:
FTP stands for File transfer Protocol whereby you can transfer your files to the web host. There are step by step instructions in the mailer from dreamhost to accomplish this task. You have two options here, either download any FTP client or use the web option provided by dreamhost https://webftp.dreamhost.com/ . I prefer the latter just because its simplicity.
Thats it! You are all set to make your mark on web. Enjoy Blogging.
Note: You can use the promocode HIGHESTDISCOUNT1 to get the maximum possible discount of $50 on dreamhost.
