Need a ratings/review script...but...

fallen_angel · Nov 7th, 2007, 21:18

Hi everyone,

I need a ratings and reviews script for a current site I'm working on...sounds simple, BUT...it needs to be XHTML compliant and accessible. *sigh*

I've spend the afternoon and evening wandering my way through Google and del.icio.us links, and have found some lovely ones, but none of them meet all the required criteria (i.e. both XHTML and accessible). As you can see from my list of del.icio.us links, I've found some great ones that look quite promising and bookmarked any that look might they may be useful at some point (I really like the JS-Kit one, but with js off, you get nothing at all), but none of them are quite there yet.

A bit more about what I'm looking for:
- I'm wanting to use it for site visitors to be able to rate and review books, so ideally it would be nice if it had a title field for the review where visitors could put the book title and name of author), but that's not essential - just a bog standard rating and review would do

- this one's a freebie as a favour for a friend, so cheap or free is good

- I'm on a Unix server so I prefer PHP, and I have MySQL 4 and PHP 4 (either DB backend or flat file's fine though)

- need to be able to run it as an include on a pre-existing page

- needs to be XHTML compliant and accessible (or reasonably accessible, e.g. will still submit/display with js off)

After wandering the web most of today, I'm beginning to think such a thing doesn't exist (or am I just going to have to find someone to do me a custom one? - I know the basics of MySQL and PHP, but not enough to put something like this together), but if anyone has any suggestions of something that might be suitable, all suggestions greatly accepted.

eblantz · Nov 9th, 2007, 18:23

thanks for the good word on our service. i've forwarded your post to our tech team for their review. If you want the service local for data control reasons, I thought you might want to know that we now support RSS of all comments/reviews data. If you want more info, feel free to contact me and i'll put you in touch with our team.

Eric

fallen_angel · Nov 9th, 2007, 19:35

Hi Eric,
You're with JS-Kit? It's not really having the service local, it more the accessibility angle, because with javascript off you get absolutely nothing, and all the sites I do have to meet the accessibility standards. Most screenreaders don't support javascript, so relying on Javascript for the reviews would potentially make it inaccessible to anyone with visual problems, specifically screen-reader users.

Though I've not found anything 100% like what I was imagining, what I did find yesterday afternoon after another day of searching, was Bookworm, which is XHTML transitional compliant (well, after I'd tweaked a couple of tiny errors anyway), and of course is ideal for book reviews. Accessibility wise it's not 100%, but it's better than anything else I've found so far. I've changed the CSS to fit in with the site's colour scheme, and though it doesn't run as an include, I've added a link back in it's navigation to the main site.

Client's happy with it , which is the main thing, but I'm always on the lookout for nice accessible things, so if anyone comes across anything I'd love to hear from them