Soft Tech Reviews

The WordPress plugin WP-PostRatings is an AJAX ratings system for WordPress and comes with three sets of images: bars, squares and stars. There isn’t anything fancy about these images and don’t really look that great on a dark background. The stars didn’t have transparency, so there was white around them, making them very ugly on a dark background.

I tried looking around to see if there was anything better that I liked, but no luck. So, I decided I would try to make my own. I’m not an expert with Photoshop, but I know my way around enough to create something. I created a set that is similar to the ones for Unobtrusive AJAX Star Rating Bar, because I like how they look.

I used a Photoshop brush to make a star and then made duplicate layers of that for the images. These images would become: ratings_off.gif, ratings_on.gif, ratings_over.gif and ratings_half.gif. So, I need four layers of this one star. I also made another layer to make the outline of the star appear darker. This was actually by accident, but once I saw how it looked, I decided to keep it.

I call them Simple Stars. Here are the results, blown up to show detail:

From left to right: over, on, half and off. The first one is displayed when the cursor moves over, the second one is displayed when there are votes, the third is displayed when there are vote(s) and a half, and the fourth is displayed when there are no votes or at the end.

Sizes available are: 16×16, 32×32 and 48×48. Until I make this available for download, please contact me if you would like it.

Instructions for WordPress WP-PostRatings plugin only. To install, just extract the simplestars directory into the WP-PostRatings plugin directory (directory should be named postratings) and then go into the Ratings options in WordPress and select simplestars. The plugin automatically detects new folders with GIFs as long as they are named correctly.