Interactive "Products Review" site - Any software ideas?

Not Blog or Forum: a list allowing "view details" ,"read reviews", etc.

[davidk]

Webmasterworld.com (and friends) is great....I find this site very helpful for SEO and other stuff, especially when I can't find the answer anywhere else...like now....

I am charged with creating a site that is supposed to list about 100 similar items. When I search "review software" I get "reviews of software" results, or BLOG or messageboard software, which does not really help me.

This is NOT a BLOG or MESSAGE BOARD about products. The products can be searched by name, price, feature, and/or SCORE. The "score" or "rank" is comes in two different ways: from an editor AND from uses.

The concept is more like C-NET reviews or e-pinions in that visitors have the opportunity to write reviews, as well as an "editor". In this case the "editor" writes a review of the products, and SCORES the products (either a % out of 100 or 1-5 stars), but at the same time visitors of the site can also "write a review" and rank the products.

Thus visitors can sort or search by "editor's rank" AND "users rank". Sorting by users ranking would need to do some basic math, like averaging out the score of 5 reviews, for example.

I am hoping that there is some sort of "review software" that someone out there knows of that will simply plug-in, and that I can manage LIKE a messageboard. I know what I am looking for is similar to "message boards" in some ways and it would be great if there was a "management console" that allows me to add and remove products, block abusive users, as well as remove illegitimate reviews.

Also, like a message board, users who want to write a review will need to "sign up" and have the password emailed to them to prevent abuse.

Unlike a message board this software needs to keep tabs on rank and "sort by rank" as well as give the product and AVERAGE sore based on all the reviews. The "rank" is always changing as more and more users review the products.

Is there some piece of software, plug-in, or extension that can keep tabs on the reviews and calcualte the rank on the fly? I am NOT so great at coldfusion or PHP yet, and I afraid the responses I will get are going to be "learn coldfusion". Is there another way? Again, this is NOT a just a message board or a BLOG.

Any ideas?

[rogerd]

Davidk, my first thought would be to suggest you check hotscripts & similar sources for "review" software and see if any of them meet your needs. Try hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/Reviews_and_Ratings/, for example. You could also check ASP and other categories depending on your platform preference.

If that doesn't work, you'll probably need some heavy-duty customization work done - perhaps blog or forum software can be modifed. I suspect that finding a package that does much of what you need and modifying it would be cheaper than starting from scratch.

[davidk]

Thanks,

After some serious research and reviewing your suggestions, I have come to find that what's available commercially is not so great. I did purchase something from Hotscripts relatively inexpensively...I'll see if I can tweek it and make it more acceptable.

Thanks again.
-DavidK

[Shannon Moore]

Some of the more robust directory/link database scripts (commercial) might be relevant, although the one I'm most familiar with (I have one license for it), in-Link, would require some custom work to do exactly what you're referring to. Out-of-the-box, though, it supports user reviews, custom search fields, ratings, editor's picks, etc.

Another option, though I think less close to what you're describing, is ReviewPost. Now, that one I have no direct experience with; I've read the features and fiddled around on a public demo of it, since it's written by the same folks that created the photo gallery script (Photopost) I run several licensed copies of.

Not affiliated with either company or any of the products, except as a paying license-holder, where mentioned above.

[DaveAtIFG]

I encountered one huge, dynamic, e-commerce site (20,000 pages), PHP based, that incorporates a product review feature. The site uses a script called "Smarty" for it's entire structure and Smarty probably has the capabilities you seek.