User provided ratings of events and directory members

Question

Has anyone created a way for users to provide feedback in the way of ratings similar to the product reviews on Amazon or Angie's List? There are two scenarios where we may be looking to do something like this.We are working in a WordPress install with Version 4.6.4 of CiviCRM

1. A recurring class, workshop or other event. Past attendee feedback so prospective attendees could decide if it is good for them.

2. A directory listing where service providers could be rated to help visitors make a choice on who they may contact.

Just looking to see if anyone had done something like this before we dive in.

Answer 1

Under Drupal, you could do this with civicrm_entity to link a Drupal entity with your CiviCRM entity. There's also the abandoned civicrmentity (no underscore) which lets you add Drupal fields directly to a CiviCRM entity without a corresponding Drupal entity.

AFAIK there's no equivalent functionality in Wordpress, so you'll have to find a Civi-native approach. You may want to get in touch with this person to get the self-service CiviEvent update functionality into core - then you could add a "rating" custom field for participants to fill out after a class. From there, a simple extension to calculate an average rating on the event would be trivial.

Doing this for contacts is a little trickier natively. I might try to do it using a new activity type - "created by" would be the user submitting the rating. "With" would be the person being rated. Again, you'd need an extension to average/count the ratings.

Answer 2

For the event rating, you may want to create a custom post type, and add a custom field to link it to a corresponding CiviCRM event, and then set up a plugin that allows post ratings.

For the user rating, what about creating WP user records for the service provider contacts? The you could use something like Users Ultra Membership Plugin to have the WP users receive ratings.

It's not ideal, but it's all I could come up with, that doesn't involve serious Civi extension writing.