Product Reviews Site?

[ZappoMan]

Have any of you ever built a "product reviews" into a WordPressMU or bbPress based site?

If so, how did you structure your architecture...

I have a customer who basically wants all the features of a blogging community but wants to add product reviews for their products. I haven't really thought too much about this yet...

The number of products is in the 10s to 100s... This is not a retailer, it's a brand manufacturer.

1) One idea I had is to make a blog for each product, let users submit "reviews" which are essentially blog posts. Other users can them comment on the review. -- I DON'T REALLY LIKE THIS IDEA

2) Another idea is to make a "products" blog. Make each product be a post/page... and then let each review be a comment to the post/page.

It seems like these plugins use the second idea:

http://www.sourcebench.com/toolbox/sb_review-wordpress-review-plugin/
http://www.dangrossman.info/wp-dg-review-site/

It looks like the SourceBench one is pretty nice....

Have any of you done this sort of project before?

[Andrea_R]

Nope, but it;s a great idea. I like the #2 option better, espeically if the commenters were registered users first.

Maybe even add a ratings plugin for each post.

And with #2, if the blog was specifically focused on one product, updates and improvements to the product are easy as writing a new post.

The number of products is in the 10s to 100s... This is not a retailer, it's a brand manufacturer.

Anybody we'd recognize that you can tell us about yet? 

Seriously though, I am amazed at all the different applications and types of sites MU will handle.

[ZappoMan]

After playing around with the SourceBench plugin a little. It seems to have all the features I want.

Pretty cool system actually. It let's users add "ratings" for various attributes on their comments. And then it will roll up all the ratings for the post to show an average rating for the post.

So for example if you were going to do a restaurant review site you could let people rate Food, Service, Price, and then you can have an overall rating where the other attributes each get their own weight (let's say  Food is 50%, Service and Price are 25% each).

If you ever need to implement something like this, I'd encourage you to check out this plugin.

[awarner20]

@ ZappoMan,

Thanks for the link, I just read up on this plugin and it seems like something I'd like to implement in the future, will take a lot of theme editing though;)