myReviewsPage WordPress Plugin
Note: We have suspended downloads of this plugin until we can find a more reliable way to access reviews information from Google Places. Unfortunately, Google does not provide an API for this, and the method we’re using to get the information is breaking consistently.
Have you ever wanted to display your online reviews on your website? This is a best practice for small businesses who want to show potential customers that you are transparent about your reviews and inviting customers to leave you more.
The myReviewsPage WordPress plugin will create a badge for you to display on your website. It calls the APIs for Yelp, Yahoo, Bing, Citysearch and FourSquare and displays the number of reviews for each on your website.
Example of myReviewsPage online reviews badge on WordPress Blog
You can choose which ones you would like to display. For example, if you don’t have any FourSquare checkins, you can just check a box and omit that one.
Installing the Plugin
Install the plugin just like any WordPress plugin. Simply upload the ZIP file using the Plugins screen.
WordPress plugin install screen
Setting up the Plugin
Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you will see a new menu item under the Plugins section in your WordPress Admin. Just click on this link to go to the setup screen.
MyReviewsPage WordPress Plugin Settings
On the setup screen, all you need to enter is your business phone number, business name, and click the “Create Badge” button. You will see a preview of the badge show up on the right.
To use the Plugin
Now that you have everything configured, adding the badge to your website is easy. The myReviewsPage Plugin uses WordPress “shortcode”. Simply add this shortcode to any page or post using HTML mode in the editor, and your reviews page will appear there.
Adding the shortcode to a WordPress Page
Download
Note: We have suspended downloads of the Plugin until we can find a more reliable way to access review information from Google Places. Unfortunately Google does not provide an API and breaks our access every time they make a change to their pages (which happens quite frequently!)
Disclaimer (Please Read)
This plugin depends on the MyReviewsPage service. This service uses APIs to retrieve your business information, and in some cases we have to pull information directly from the reviews page (Google does not have an API for this.) This leads to a fragile environment – if one of the providers changes something on their page it can temporarily make those reviews unavailable to the plugin.
This is a FREE plugin. We support it as best we can, but please don’t hold us responsible if Google or one of the other providers changes their api or screen and breaks our plugin, ok?
Let me know if you have any questions or feedback – I’d love to hear them!
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Hi Patrick,
I’ve tested badge with WordPress 3.1 and it works fine. So you may be seeing a conflict with another plugin. What other plugins do you have installed?
Thanks Matt!
When you say the alternate URL functionality is not working, what do you mean? Are you having trouble overriding a particular review service? I’m seeing trouble with Google reviews right now for some businesses. They have probably changed something again and I need to go back and troubleshoot that. I don’t think this has anything to do with the version of WordPress you are using.
As of right now, I don’t have a good way to add the plugin to a sidebar widget because WordPress shortcodes don’t work in widgets. Sorry!
hey Don – I figured what the issue was – could not run the application locally. Once I uploaded to live server, it worked fine. Maybe something to document? Thanks for the reply!
Cheers,
Patrick
Yes – that’s a good one for the FAQ. Thanks Patrick!
Hey Don,
Yes, I am going into my settings to manually insert the Google link, but it still will not register. It isn’t a huge issue, I have just hidden Google for now. Thanks for your reply. I will keep checking back for updates.
Don,
Is there any way to have multiple badges. I have directory site and i would like to have badges for each listing.
Good question, Jason. I asked Don about this in February. Any progress yet?
Jason, Dave,
We haven’t figured this out yet. Google has changed it’s screens several times on us (they don’t have an API, so we need to grab the info from the places page itself.) Also, when we query the other services via API, they set limits on how many times we can query in a day. This makes it problematic to use our service to populate directories with lots of business profiles. We’d use up our API quota quickly.
Anyway, we’re working on it but I wanted to give you a sense of what’s involved so you have an idea of why it’s taking so long…
Thanks, Don, I appreciate the update and the frustration of dealing with things like this.
Don,
Yes, appreciate quick response. Is there a way to release a dumbed down version where requires manual entry of what reviews (grab the info from the places page itself.) This would be similar to a gallery (nextgen) plugin or social media plugin where you can create as many as you want with each getting a unique shortcode.
This is a great plugin, its exactly what I needed for a client site I’m working on. The only problem I have is figuring out how to style the badge. I went through all of the plugin files and I can’t figure out how it outputs a table structure, or where the css styling is coming from. I don’t want to butcher your plugin, I just need to change a few things related to css. I’m more of a designer than a dev. Could you tell me which part of which file handles the look of the final output of the badge? Thanks.
I vote for multiple badge capability too!
It would essentially serve as a dealer locator for a company that distributes through multiple retailers and installers and showcase their online presence as well. Win, win.
Hi Don! Great plugin, it’s perfect for our local clients. I just had one question – is there an easy way to put the shortcode into a widget? I’d love to have the reviews featured on our front page in a widget, along with on the interior sidebars.
Hi! Looks like this would be a valuable asset for help local biz owner’s with rep mgmt… Is there anyway we can “white-label” the tool or remove the branding of the plugin for a small fee?
Does this plugin work with other sites like Yelp and Bing? I understand Google does not issue an API unfortunately but this may be a handy tool none the less.
Any update on the multiple badges. I too am building a directory and would like to have this for each one of my listings. Also, I have a socialengine4 directory, Is there anyway of migrating files to Zend with some serious development work in order to be compatible with SE4? Please let me know when you have a chance.
Thanks
I would be very interested in this. Is there a way to get on a notification list when it’s fixed?
@solo, Jason, Soccer Field, Dave, Elise,
I did get a lot of requests for the multiple badge capability for directory sites and I can see the need for it.
We ran into so many problems pulling the Google reviews because of the lack of an API that all my engineering time and effort has been going into that. At this point, it is changing so often that we can’t sustain it.
So we’re holding off on this until they come up with a better way of pulling reviews from Google Places. If and when we get past that, we will look at handling multiple businesses for directories.
@Rebecca, unfortunately shortcodes do not work in WordPress Widgets. I’d like to do a widget but we’re having too many problems pulling the Google Places reviews right now to invest in creating the widget. Sorry!
Hi Cindy, Yes it does work with Yelp and Bing, and CitySearch because they actually have APIs that we can query to get the results.
@Stevie, we don’t have a style sheet exposed for the display of the plugin. I know, that seems obvious in hindsight :) It would be cool to add this but I don’t see this happening in the near future. If you download the plugin you do have the source code, but I know that’s a lot to wade through.
Hi Eric, we did produce a white label version of the tool but it is not free because we have to maintain a server and email infrastructure. You can find it here: http://expand2web.refmobworks.com/
@Rebecca and don:
Yes, you can run shortcodes in widgets. Just add this code to your functions.php file:
add_filter(‘widget_text’, ‘do_shortcode’);
@Dave, sweeeet – thanks for the tip!
Sure opens up a lot of possibilities, doesn’t it?
Seems like Google is a huge bottleneck for you. I have dealt with similar issues when grabbing content via parsing over http.
Why not just disable Google from the plugin???? not everyone cares if google places reviews are included! It’s still a great plugin and especially for directories its perfect. I am interested in this for one of my projects. And I don’t care about Google. If they don’t offer an API, there’s probably a reason for it. I’d rather not publish something if it’s against TOS…
To Patrick O’Keeffe or anyone else having issues running a site with this plugin locally. Your issue may be similar to mine. This may be updated by now, but my issue was in the myReviewsPage.php file on line 77.
The opening php tag was a short tag. Depending on your server setup this may not be supported. So try changing this – <?
to this- <?php
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