Snapchat takes the Mental Health Awareness Initiative

If you use Snapchat then you are going to love it more, thanks to the recent mental awareness initiative taken by the app by introducing a ‘Here for You’ feature on their app. The tool will help users to get their hands on the mental health resources in no time that can assist them in need. The...

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by Madiha via Digital Information World

.Com domain names may see an increase in prices

ICANN and Verisign are working on a new agreement that may raise the price of domains ending with .com. According to domain registrar company Namecheap, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has given Verisign permission to increase the price of .com domains. As per the...

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by Saima Salim via Digital Information World

What it takes to maintain a large open source project

#475 — February 14, 2020 Unsubscribe  :  Read on the Web An oddly quiet week in terms of big, timely news, but yet again there's so much generally going on that I think we've got a good issue here :-) Till next week! JavaScript Weekly FullCalendar: A Full Sized JavaScript Calendar Control — An interesting option if you want a Google Calendar style control for your own apps. Has connectors for React, Vue and Angular. The base version is MIT licensed, but there’s a ‘premium’ version too. Adam Shaw How to Make a WebGL-Powered US Counties Map with D3 and Three.js — Creating a simple SVG-based map is one thing, but if you want the best performance, leaning on WebGL and your GPU is a good option. This tutorial covers how to approach moving from SVG to WebGL by way of Three.js. Mika Iriarte New: Our 'Most Loved' JavaScript Course 🧡 Gets Updated — Take your JavaScript to the next level. Gain an understanding of callbacks, higher order functions, closure, asynchronous and object-oriented JavaScript. Frontend Masters sponsor On the Maintenance of Large Open-Source Projects — A written-up group chat with former Node core team member Bert Belder (of libuv fame) and Leaflet creator Vladimir Agafonkin about what it takes to maintain large open source projects. Anne-Laure Civeyrac Tiny Helpers: Single Purpose Online Tools for Web Developers — A growing collection of single-purpose online tools aimed at developers of all types. Covers things like base64 conversion, color management, favicon generators, exploring JavaScript ASTs, key codes.. Stefan Judis 7 (Possibly) Good Reasons Not to Use TypeScript — Hang on.. did you read that headline right? Why not to use TypeScript? Yes, despite all the buzz around TypeScript, you don’t have to use it and there might be good reasons not to (although the reasons presented are highly opinionated and you’re free to disagree too). Michael Krasnov Quick bytes: There's a sneaky bug in Chrome 80 that affects Array#reduce and it has broken people's Angular apps. Here's a potential quick fix. If you want to go to VueConf in Austin in a few weeks, I'm told this is the last week you can get tickets. 💻 Jobs Find a Dev Job Through Vettery — Vettery is completely free for job seekers. Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers. Vettery Announcing a 100% Remote Opportunity as a Sr. Fullstack Dev (Node/React) — We’re passionate about giving developers the chance to do meaningful work by building transformational technology solutions. Clevertech 📘 Articles & Tutorials Why JavaScript is Eating HTML — The idea of JavaScript and HTML remaining separate and never the twain shall meet is now decidedly old-school and HTML-in-JS (a la JSX) is definitely A Thing™. Here’s a tour of all the parts involved. Mike Turley Building a Continuous Integration and Deployment Pipeline Using Docker — A really sweet, well paced tutorial that almost anyone would be able to follow to set up a basic CI/CD process for a Node app. Tania Rascia A Pool Table-Style 'Bouncing Balls' Simulation in Plain JS — It’s mostly code but included in tutorials as it’s designed to be a learning experience. Here’s a demo of the end result. Meto Trajkovski Optimize the Performance of Single Page Applications Using RUM Site24x7 sponsor How to Publish an Updated Version of an npm Package — If you release your own npm packages, or if you’ve inherited packages from your team, this is a nice guide that covers many of the challenges with getting a new version out. Scott Vandehey 70 JavaScript Interview Questions — You’re never going to get a list like this that’s perfect but it’s a pretty solid list of the sorts of questions (and answers) you could get thrown at an interview, so if you’re in that position.. Mark Abeto 4 Methods to Search Through Arrays — includes, find, indexOf, and filter. Stephen Hartfield ▶  Fast by Default: Algorithmic Performance Optimization in Practice — A talk from dotJS 2019. Vladimir Agafonkin ForwardJS Ottawa (May 26-29) Speakers Announced — Topics include React/Redux, TypeScript, containers, design systems, static sites, scaling teams and monorepos. Join us. ForwardJS sponsor Building Bridges with Other Departments in Developer Relations — If you've been in the JavaScript world a while, you might be familiar with Estelle Weyl and her insights will interest you if a career in developer relations has ever intrigued you. Dave Nugent and Estelle Weyl How To Create Maps with React and Leaflet Shajia Abidi Building a 'Grouper' Component for Svelte — Mat Ryer shows how you can build a Grouper component in Svelte to neatly group up lists into meaningful sections. Mat Ryer 🔧 Code & Tools Debug Visualizer: Visualize Data While Debugging in VS Code — An interesting looking VS Code extension that lets you visualize the result of an repeatedly evaluated expression. An intriguing idea, though I think you’d need to fiddle a bit to get the results you want. Henning Dieterichs plink-plonk.js: Listen to Web Pages As Their DOM Changes — This is really cool. Run this code at a console on a ‘busy’ Web page with lots of DOM changes and updates and you’ll be able to ‘hear’ them taking place. Tom Hicks Stream Chat API & JavaScript SDK for Custom Chat Apps — Build real-time chat in less time. Rapidly ship in-app messaging with our highly reliable chat infrastructure. Stream sponsor Type Route: A Flexible, Type-Safe Routing Library — A flexible routing library with TypeScript support, designed with React integration in mind (indeed, it’s used in React Router), but can be used with any framework (Vue, Angular, etc). type-route Ionic 5 Released: A Popular Webapp + Native Framework — Ionic’s goal is to get you an app you can put on an app store and the Web with a single shared code base, yet with adaptive styling to look native in each case. It was originally focused on Angular but now has an official React integration. Brandy Carney esbuild: An Extremely Fast JavaScript Bundler and Minifier, But... — An experiment in proving that tools for bundling JavaScript can actually be very fast.. though in this case by implementing one in Go ;-) Evan Wallace LegraJS: Render Lego Brick Graphics to a Canvas — A small library for drawing LEGO style brick shapes on to a canvas. Preet Shihn

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10 Best WordPress Star Rating Plugins

Star ratings are used by websites to review all kinds of products and services. You can use them to rate pretty much anything your users are interested in: a movie, the food in a restaurant, the quality of service provided by a mechanic, etc.

One of the reasons star ratings are so popular is that they allow users to quickly determine the quality of a product or service based on the experience of people who have used it.

It is also very common to find businesses asking people to rate their services or products. This is because people are more likely to buy something if they see real reviews from other people who have actually used it.

If your website sells something, it is a good idea to include a star rating system somewhere so that your customers can review your products.

In this post, I'll list the ten best WordPress star rating plugins that you can use today.

WordPress Star Rating Plugins on CodeCanyon

There are currently about 75 premium WordPress star rating plugins available on CodeCanyon. All of them serve some unique purpose, like adding a star rating field to different forms or allowing users to review a product or service on your website.

The price for some of these star rating plugins starts from as low as $7. The fact that you get free lifetime updates and six months of free support makes buying them a very good deal.

Best Star Rating Plugins on CodeCanyon

Here is a brief review of the best star rating plugins that you can buy on CodeCanyon:

Stellar—Star Rating Plugin for WordPress

Stellar is a simple star rating plugin for WordPress that gives you the option to create and save ratings for each WordPress entry like a post, page, or product.

The review microdata is also visible in search results, so you will get a boost in visibility. It is fully compatible with all popular WordPress themes.

It comes with a lot of customization options. You can easily change the color, size, and shape of icons that are used to display the rating to users. The rating assigned to each post or page is also visible on the search page.

The plugin has cross-browser compatibility and does not rely on jQuery to work properly.

Testimonials Showcase WordPress Plugin

This plugin gives you an easy way to display testimonials, reviews, and quotes from users in an attractive layout.

It is ideal for situations where you have to display testimonials from your clients and customers. You can also use it to display reviews for different products on your website.

It is very flexible in terms of customization options and offers a responsive design. It's compatible with rich snippets and structured data used by search engines to display reviews and ratings in search results.

The reviews and testimonials can be showcased on the front-end either as a grid or as a slider. Each of these layouts comes with its own settings to control the look and feel of the reviews.

There are five different themes that you can use with this plugin: rounded speech bubbles, flat speech bubbles, flat card box, quote marks, or simple separator.

BNE Testimonials Pro

You can use the WordPress BNE Testimonials Pro plugin to display testimonials and reviews anywhere on your website.

The testimonials and reviews are made up of multiple elements like a featured image of the person or company writing the review, the actual review content, and additional fields for the name, website link, and the rating from the reviewer.

The plugin offers a large variety of customization and layout options for the reviews. You can choose from four different layouts: list, slider, thumbnail slider, and masonry grid. There are also four different themes: simple, default, bubbles, and cards.

The star ratings incorporate Schema.org tags to make sure that the rich snippets for the review are visible in search results.

One big advantage of using this plugin is that it offers the ability to import reviews from other platforms like Facebook, Google, and Yelp. So, if your users have written any reviews about your business on Facebook, they will be automatically pulled and added to your own website.

Gravity Forms Star Rating Field

This Gravity Forms Star Rating Field plugin allows you to add star rating fields to all your Gravity Forms.

You can choose from 14 different styles for the star rating field. There are also some other customization options like showing the current rating value on hover or click and showing some custom rating text in tooltips. Customize the rating label and the value saved in the database.

Contact Form 7 Star Rating Field

This Contact Form 7 Star Rating Field plugin offers the same functionality provided by the previous plugin. However, it has been developed for Contact Form 7.

This lets you add star rating fields to any of your Contact Form 7 forms. There are 12 different customization options available.

It works with all versions of the Contact Form 7 plugin, and you can also make the rating field required for form submission. The plugin also allows you to set a default rating value for the field.

One more feature that you will find useful is the ability to include rating results in an email using a shortcode.

Rating Form

This is one of the best WordPress star rating plugins on CodeCanyon. It is highly rated and receives updates at regular intervals. Each update also adds a lot of new features to the plugin.

It comes with a long list of features. For example, the plugin works perfectly with right-to-left (RTL) languages and cache plugins. You can also edit previously submitted ratings, allowing people to change their reviews at a later date.

The ratings are updated using AJAX, and a nice spinning animation is shown while the plugin updates the rating in the database. The results are immediately visible on the webpage once a user submits the ratings.

You can choose from different rating images provided by the plugin or upload your own custom images. You can add star ratings to any post or webpage using shortcodes. It is also possible to use the ratings with comments by using the comment_id attribute in shortcodes.

AP Custom Testimonial Pro

The AP Custom Testimonial Pro plugin also allows you to showcase reviews and testimonials from your clients and customers on your website.

This plugin offers a lot of options for displaying the testimonials on the site. You can also create your own custom layout to showcase the testimonials based on some predefined templates.

The plugin comes with 12 different layouts to display the user reviews. It also offers some other unique features like embedding videos in the testimonials or only displaying certain user reviews based on their ID. You can also optionally add links to the social media accounts of clients who write a review.

The plugin gives you granular control over all aspects of the review. This includes things like the image border color, review title color, review content color, etc.

The shortcode generator that comes with this plugin makes it incredibly easy for you to create custom shortcodes to display the testimonials exactly the way you want.

Free WordPress Star Rating Plugins

Before listing some free WordPress star rating plugins, I would like to mention that using premium plugins comes with its own advantages.

The premium plugin developers are more likely to provide regular updates and solve any issues that you might be facing with the use of these plugins. This is especially true for the best-sellers on CodeCanyon.

Also, the premium plugins generally offer a more polished design to give your website a professional look.

But sometimes a free plugin is the right choice for a limited budget—I've pulled together a few of these free plugins below.

Rate My Post—WP Post Rating

People who are only looking for a WordPress star rating plugin so that they can allow users to rate their posts and pages should consider using the Rate My Post WordPress plugin. It will allow you to easily add ratings to all your posts and pages using shortcodes.

Site Reviews

This plugin is more suited for people who want to allow users to provide reviews in a manner similar to websites like TripAdvisor or Yelp. It comes with a nice set of features that you can see on the plugin description page.

Yasr—Yet Another Stars Rating

This plugin comes with two different types of ratings. The first type is provided by the post author. This is ideal for websites that publish reviews of different products and services. The second type gives your visitors the ability to vote.

Best Practices to Keep in Mind When Using Star Rating Plugins

The ultimate goal of using these star rating plugins is to help your website visitors. So here are some guidelines that you can follow to use them in a way that benefits the visitors. 

1. Place Ratings Only in Important Places

If you are reviewing a product or service for your visitors, make sure that you don't place the same ratings in ten different places. If you are writing a detailed review of the product, it is acceptable to provide different ratings for different aspects like the design, quality, pricing, etc. However, don't use the same overall 8/10 rating in six different places in a post.

2. Use Rich Snippet Data With the Correct Attributes

Search engines usually display star ratings in their search results only when they think that it will provide some useful information. For example, let's say you use rich snippets that display star ratings for products but use attributes that indicate that the rating is for posts. In such cases, the search engines might not show the ratings in their search results at all. So make sure that the rich snippet data to show the ratings has the correct attributes.

Final Thoughts

In this post, we have briefly reviewed both free and premium WordPress star rating plugins that you can add to your website. The aim of the post was to include the best WordPress star rating plugins for certain tasks like user testimonials, form fields, and product reviews.

The Best WordPress Plugins on CodeCanyon

If you are looking for a WordPress plugin for any use, take a look at the premium WordPress plugins on CodeCanyon. Hopefully, one of the plugins listed there will meet all your needs.

Here are a few of the best-selling and hot new WordPress plugins available on CodeCanyon for 2020.

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  24 Best WPBakery Page Builder (Visual Composer) Addons & Plugins of 2020
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  17 Best WordPress Slider & Carousel Plugins of 2020
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  20 Best WordPress Calendar Plugins and Widgets
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by Monty Shokeen via Envato Tuts+ Code

Facebook Comments Plugin Is A Favorite Tool of Spammers: Report

Facebook built comments plugin to allow users to leave comments on websites, blogs and forums through their Facebook accounts. It was expected to provide high-quality conversations over the internet but instead ended up spamming popular sites. News and Media Sites like BuzzFeed and Ozy have...

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by Aqsa Rasool via Digital Information World

How To Impact Consumer Behavior With Your Or Stock Photos

Visuals form the basis of how entrepreneurs communicate with their customers, as well as increase their audience reach. In recent times, marketers have employed photographs as a tool to enhance communication and boost sales. With social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, all...

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by Web Desk via Digital Information World

YouTube Stories: Success Tips From a Top YouTuber

Do you want to connect more often with your YouTube subscribers without releasing a full video? Are you taking advantage of YouTube’s Stories and Community tab features? To explore how to use YouTube Stories and the YouTube Community tab, I interview Evan Carmichael on the Social Media Marketing Podcast. Evan is a successful YouTuber with […]

The post YouTube Stories: Success Tips From a Top YouTuber appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

by Michael Stelzner via Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner