plone.contentratings (1.0)

Assigning Ratings

On the Rating Assignments tab, you can choose a portal type and then select the rating categories to associate with the type in the multi-select below the type selector. Once you have selected the categories, press the save button before selecting another type.

Once this is done, a rating UI will appear on the view for the selected type. This ui will allow setting and viewing ratings in all the selected categories. The order in which the categories appear will be the same as the order in the multi-select, and is determined by the order specified in the rating category configuration (see the next section).

You can disable ratings on an individual content object on the edit form for that content object. Just uncheck the Enable Ratings checkbox on the Settings tab.

Managing Categories

The Manage Categories tab of the control panel allows you to create custom categories, and modify or remove categories that you have created. Initially, there will be no local categories, only Acquired Categories. These are categories which are not defined in the control panel but in python packages/products on the filesystem. The acquired categories cannot be edited.

To add a new category, click the Add Local Categories button. Then fill in a title for the category (this is the title that will appear in the rating UI). All other fields are optional. You may enter a description (primarily for documentation purposes). You can enter TALES expressions for determining when users can and cannot view or set ratings in the category. If left blank all users will be able to both view and set ratings. To use permissions to restrict the ratings, use an expression like:

python: checkPermission('View', context)

The order in which the categories are displayed in the UI is determined by the order attribute which should be an integer. The view setting determines how the rating should appear in the UI. Python products can register rating views to provide different look and feel or behavior. Instructions for creating and registering new views can be found in the documentation of the contentratings package. If you use a completely custom class for your view, make sure it implements the contentratings.browser.interfaces.IRatingView interface and is registered for the contentratings.interfaces.IUserRating interface, which will ensure that it appears in the listing.

You can remove custom categories by checking the box next to the category and clicking the remove button. You can of course edit any of the category attributes. You must click the Save button to record your changes (including removing categories).

Notes On Category Names: Internally, categories are registered and accessed using unique names. For TTW created categories, these names are generated from the title using a mechanism similar to that used by Plone to generate ids for content objects. This has a couple of consequences. If you create a category, rate content using that category, and then remove the category, the ratings will still be stored on the content under the original category name. So if you later create a "new" category with the same title (and hence the same name), all content previously rated under the category will still have rating information attached. This makes it very easy to undo a mistaken removal of a category, but may cause some unexpected behavior.

Additionally, this also makes it possible to override a category defined globally by creating one with an identical name. However, there is no guarantee that the names of globally defined are related to their titles, so it's not always obvious how to do this, nor is aldoing this recommended. You may end up with two categories with the same title , differentiated only by their order, which is likely to lead to confusion when assigning categories.