Plugin / GoodReviews
James R. Hanback, Jr.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
GoodReviews serves a very specific requirement. It was primarily developed to enable an author or a bookseller to display Goodreads title information and reader reviews on a WordPress site. Goodreads is a social network for book lovers that enables members to rate and review books.
WordPress 3.8 introduced support for the dashicons font, which contains the star and half-star symbols that GoodReviews uses in the Book Info pane. If you do not use the Book Info pane, you can probably successfully install and use GoodReviews in WordPress 3.5 or later.
As of GoodReviews 2.0.0, you can use either a widget OR the shortcode to display each of the three GoodReviews panes (About This Book, Buy This Book, and Reviews From Goodreads). However, style issues might make it tricky to try to use both the widgets and the shortcode on the same site because any CSS/style changes you make will apply to both the widgets and the shortcode. It is recommended that you choose to use either the GoodReviews widgets or the GoodReviews shortcode, not both.
Version 1.0.4 or later supports the use of a Goodreads ID instead of an ISBN to retrieve title information from Goodreads. Replace the isbn parameter in the shortcode with grid and use the Goodreads ID number instead of an ISBN. ISBNs are still supported as well.
GoodReviews offers two ways to control the height and width of its elements. You can either create custom Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in your theme, or you can specify height, width, and border values in the shortcode. To use the shortcode method, include one or all of the following parameters in the shortcode:
height=””
width=””
border=””
For example, to display the book information and reviews in 500×500 elements with a bordered iframe reviews element, you could issue the following shortcode:
[goodreviews isbn="0000000000000" height="500" width="500" border="On"]
Version 1.1.0 and later supports the complete disabling of the default styles by providing a valid URL to an alternate stylesheet on the GoodReviews Settings page. If you have previously altered your theme CSS to modify GoodReviews CSS elements for a previous version of GoodReviews, you should provide a URL to a blank stylesheet file in the Alternate Stylesheet URL field.
Version 1.1.0 and later supports customizing the look of the book info, buy info, and reviews elements by supplying the URL to an alternate stylesheet on the Settings page. You can also use the following shortcode parameters:
grbackground – provide the hexadecimal code for the background color you want (do not include the # symbol)
grtext – provide the hexadecimal code for the text color you want (do not include the # symbol)
grstars – provide the hexadecimal code for the star color you want (do not include the # symbol)
grlinks – provide the hexadecimal code for the text color you want (do not include the $ symbol)
For example, issuing the following shortcode will style the GoodReviews elements with white text on black background along with blue stars and red links.
[goodreviews isbn="0000000000000" grbackground="000" grtext="fff" grstars="00f" grlinks="f00"]
You can use the grnumber parameter to control the number of reviews that are displayed on each page of reviews. By default, 10 reviews per page are displayed. The following code would configure GoodReviews to return 20 reviews per page instead:
[goodreviews isbn="0000000000000" grnumber="20"]
You can configure GoodReviews to return only the reviews that meet a minimum star rating. By default, the plugin returns all reviews, regardless of star rating. The following code would configure GoodReviews to return only reviews that have a 3-star rating or higher:
[goodreviews isbn="0000000000000" grminimum="3"]
Issue the shortcode with the cover parameter to select the Goodreads large cover image, small cover image, or no cover image at all. For example, to use the large cover image (which is the default), you would issue the following shortcode:
[goodreviews isbn=”0000000000000″ cover=”large”]
To use the small cover image, you would issue the following shortcode:
[goodreviews isbn=”0000000000000″ cover=”small”]
To turn off the cover completely, you would issue the following shortcode:
[goodreviews isbn=”0000000000000″ cover=”off”]
Yes, as of version 1.0.4 and later. By default, the author photo is not displayed. You can enable the display of either the large version or the scaled version of your Goodreads author photo by issuing the shortcode with the author parameter. For example, to show the large version of your author photo, you could use the following shortcode:
[goodreviews isbn=”0000000000000″ author=”large”]
To use the small version of your author photo, you could use the following shortcode:
[goodreviews isbn=”0000000000000″ author=”small”]
You can turn off the book information element by issuing the shortcode with the bookinfo parameter set to off. For example:
[goodreviews isbn=”0000000000000″ bookinfo=”off”]
You can turn off the book buying links by issuing the shortcode with the buyinfo parameter set to off. For example:
[goodreviews isbn=”0000000000000″ buyinfo=”off”]
Version 2.0.0 supports disabling the reviews frame by configuring the reviews parameter to off. However, because the main point of GoodReviews is to display reviews, this parameter was only implemented so that the Buy This Book widget and the Book Info widget could be dislayed without reviews.
This is a mystery to me. The GoodReviews plugin uses what the Goodreads API returns for a given ISBN. Therefore, if the information is in the API feed, GoodReviews will display it. Unfortunately, sometimes the information for some titles/editions appears to be excluded from the API feed even if it is present on the Goodreads link for that title.
No, nor should you. Turning off the Goodreads credits is a violation of their API Terms and Conditions.
Ensure that you enter the shortcode in TEXT/HTML mode, not VISUAL mode.
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Ratings
4
2 reviews
Rating breakdown
Details Information
Version
2.2.4
First Released
14 Apr, 2012
Total Downloads
12,760
Wordpress Version
3.8 or higher
Tested up to:
5.2.4
Require PHP Version:
-
Tags
Contributors
Languages
The plugin hasn't been transalated in any language other than English.
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