Which Plugins for A UGC Reviews Site?

[Planet13]

I was thinking of creating a reviews site (kind of like yelp) but for a particular form of art (it is kind of a niche). I like to use the genesis framework.

I thought I would use the Comments areas for the actual user reviews. People would be able to vote up or vote down the reviews, mark them as funny / brilliant / so bad it's good.

Also, the people who write the reviews would be able to designate a tag (or two) for the reviews. Some tags might be: Serious, Sarcastic, Long, Short, etc.,

Wondering what plugins I might need. I am pretty sure I will need Advanced Custom fields. Would like to know what would allow users to vote up and vote down.

And it would be great to know if there was a way to keep track of the page with the most frequent reviews, or the review that gets the most thumbs up, or thumbs down.

Thanks in advance.

[Planet13]

Forgot the most important part...

I would like the comment with the most up votes to be at the top of the comments, while the comment that acquires the least votes to move down to the bottom of the comment section.

So the number of up votes versus down votes would determine the position of the comments.

[lorax]

There may be a theme developed for Genesis that includes most of these functions. There may be plugins or custom Javascript code available for use with the theme but likely you'll need to do some customizations.

[Planet13]

@ lorax:

Thanks for the suggestions. I will look into it.

But as a general rule, does it make sense to make a review site USING COMMENTS in wordpress if the reviews are only going to be rather short (maybe two paragraphs at most)?

Or am I missing something obvious?

[lorax]

While the devil is in the details I think the concept in general is sound. Use the native functionality as much as is reasonable - it's fast & reliable. That's not to say that a plugin or custom code is any worse or better. It's just I prefer to keep things simple for many reasons.

If your content clearly sets the expectations and provides guidelines for how you want the user to interact, then you've accomplished half the work. The other half will be managing comments/reviews. Then all you need is to find a solution for pinning one or more reviews at the top and a voting system. Neither strike me as hard to do - and may already exist.

[Planet13]

Thanks again!

[Planet13]

Well, on studiopress the response I got was that plugins were the way to go, because if I used theme-based functionality, I would lose that functionality if I ever change themes.

On the other hand, if I use plugin-based functionality and the developer stops updating that plugin, well, at least the reviews would still be in the database since they are comments.