Reviews for Easy Digital Downloads makes it quick and easy for your visitors and customers to review the products offered on your website. We’re thrilled to release beta 1 of version 2.1. This is a significant update for Reviews that we’ve been working on for a few months now.
New reports
Reporting has been added to Reviews to get a better sense of how downloads are rated and which download is most reviewed.
Three reports have been introduced:
- Highest Average Rating of Products
- Lowest Average Rating of Products
- Most Reviewed Products
Request a review
A hugely requested feature that is coming to Reviews 2.1 is store owners being able to request reviews from customers after they’ve made a purchase.
This feature can be enabled and configured from the Reviews Emails settings (Downloads > Settings > Emails > Reviews).
If the email is scheduled to send at a later time, a CRON job will be scheduled to send the email at the set time. The setting can also have a Start Date set to ensure only customers who have made purchases since the set date will get emails.
Shortcode enhancements
We’ve made some significant enhancements to the shortcodes and the processing that occurs in the background to render out the contents of shortcodes.
A new shortcode has been introduced to display the average rating of a download. It will display the name of the download along with the calculated average rating.
A bug with the use of output buffering has been fixed to ensure multiple reviews are displayed when using the reviews shortcode.
Emails
All emails sent by Reviews are now fully customisable and can all make use of distinct email template tags. Further to that, we’ve introduced an optional Review Notification email that sends an email to site administrators when a new review is posted. The contents of the email sent is similar to that of WordPress’ moderation email.
The emails that can be customized are:
- Reviewer Discount email
- Request review email
- FES Vendor Feedback email
- Admin notification email
Metabox UI refresh
The metabox on the Download edit page which displayed the most recent reviews has been revamped to be cleaner, intuitive and easier to use. It now uses AJAX to update the status of reviews so changes can be made without having to leave the edit. Replies can also be made inline and from the metabox and again submitted via AJAX.
Guest reviews
Reviews can now be posted without having a user account registered on the site beforehand. This again can be enabled from the Settings page.
Other improvements
- New feature added to allow the posting of a review to be delayed by a certain amount of days after purchasing
[[downloads]]shortcode can now be sorted by average rating- Only load CSS on single downloads and remove fixed width of labels
- Introduced an option to prevent authors from leaving reviews on their own products
- Use
edd_get_option()instead of$edd_optionsglobal to ensure the correct filters are applied. - All the review counter bars are now responsive
- “Insert Review” media button wasn’t displaying anything when modal was opened
- Rating stars now display correct on the “Vendor Feedback page”
- Dashboard widget now links to the correct URLs
Beta testing
The first beta of Reviews version 2.1 is available to all valid license holders now, allowing store owners to try it out on their staging environments before going live with it. We’ve been testing it extensively prior to releasing this beta and are confident with this version, but we encourage testing first to be sure. To learn how to opt-in to beta versions of our extensions, you can use this guide.
Looking forward to this release