5 Star Rating
Thursday May 25, 2006
Yesterday Chesso19 posted in our web forum:
"I've been trying to make a basic rating system that allows a user to click on one of five images, each representing a number from 1 to 5 (1,2,3,4 or 5) and somehow calculate a 1-5 rating from the results."
Our suggestion was that the most simple way to do this is to have one table column hold the total number of votes, and a second column hold the running total. Each time a vote is cast, we would add 1 to the total votes and add 1-5 (whatever they ranked it) to the running total. Then we could easily calculate the average rating by dividing the running total by the total votes. This 5 star rating tutorial shows an example of how it is done.
Obviously there are other ways (some more difficult than others) to do this. How would you go about creating a ranking system?
"I've been trying to make a basic rating system that allows a user to click on one of five images, each representing a number from 1 to 5 (1,2,3,4 or 5) and somehow calculate a 1-5 rating from the results."
Our suggestion was that the most simple way to do this is to have one table column hold the total number of votes, and a second column hold the running total. Each time a vote is cast, we would add 1 to the total votes and add 1-5 (whatever they ranked it) to the running total. Then we could easily calculate the average rating by dividing the running total by the total votes. This 5 star rating tutorial shows an example of how it is done.
Obviously there are other ways (some more difficult than others) to do this. How would you go about creating a ranking system?
Well the next day I kind of figured out my own way as I said in the forums (I hate when that happens, you need help and ask and then end up figuring it out….).
Anyway, it is a bit different and I quite like it, what I did was for the rating part, just simple have one Decimal type field in a table (I used the actual file entry’s table) with Length/Value as 1,2.
I had 5 images for rating 1-5 and they worked as follows:
Rating of 5 – Put rating field up by 0.10.
Rating of 4 – Put rating field up by 0.05.
Rating of 3 – Put rating field up by 0.03.
Rating of 2 – Put rating field down by 0.05.
Rating of 1 – Put rating field down by 0.05.
After updating the field I then check to make sure that rating is not below 0 and not above 5, otherwise they are reset to 0 or 5 respectively.
Then for display I simple get the value from the rating field and use the php function round() when displaying it to remove the decimal place values from it.
This seems to work fairly well, and a simple change of the 1-5 rating values will affect how easily the rating changes.
Opps slight type there, for a rating of one it should go down by 0.10 (-0.10).
And just to clarify, when creating the decimal type field in the Length/Value box I put 1,2. Meaning 1 character long before the decimal place and 2 characters long after the decimal place (To allow up/down by two decimal places, e.g. 0.25).