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A few years ago, I never would have imagined all the possible uses for Wordpress we have today. Turning Wordpress into a review site is just one of the new popular uses for everyone’s favorite CMS. The easiest way to do this is with the help of a plugin. Just recently, 2 review plugins for Wordpress have gained some popularity over at Wickedfire; WPReviewEngine and WFReview.

I’ve used WFReview for a handful of my Wordpress based already, and I’ve got to say, I love it! But it would be dumb of me to ignore other options. When the developer of WPReviewEngine created a sales thread on Wickedfire, I figured I’d give it a try. I promised the developer a review many months ago, but wasn’t able to get to it. But I’m happy I didn’t, because just a month ago version 2.0 was released with many features that I find essential for such a plugin.

Important Features

• Add ratings via comments – Essential for user interaction.
• Editor ratings – For affiliate reviews and product reviews in general.
• Custom fields – Required for displaying additional info in posts, and and easy way to add thumbnails into many themes.
• Comparison tables – Largly a feature geared towards landing pages.
• Google Maps Integration – If building a local directory you can not live without this feature.
• Automatically Generated Comments – Great way to make your site look busy and add some credibility to your reviews.
• Import Data from CSV – If you aren’t using review plugins to generate insane amounts of content, you should be, and you’ll need this.
• Sidebar Widgets – If you could just use code to display top rated posts, I’d prefer that, but these graphical widgets are cool too.
• Link Cloaking – There used to be a bunch of plugins for coaking mass links with Wordpress

There are some other features mentioned on WPReviewEngine but they aren’t worth mentioning or are (what should be) standard features.

Advantages

Right off the bat, I get the impressions WPReviewEngine was designed for products rather than directories. This is by no means a bad thing. Comparison tables, widgets, editor ratings, and of course, comment ratings are all important features for a product review site.

Unless you want to spend weeks entering data, or paying someone else to, you better make use to the CSV Import feature. I just imported over 1000 records and now have a full fledged site loaded with content. You can go one step further and generate comments for your posts as well.

What really sets WPReviewEngine apart from the rest is the comment templates feature, making it possible to generate unique, readable, comments on the fly.

Here is the comments generation page. Towards the top you can see how the comment templates work, as well as other auto-gen comment settings.

A good Wordpress Plugin will work with little to no modifcations by the user, and HBZSoftware has done just that. Beyond editing basic settings via the control panel, WPReviewEngine is ready to go right out of the box.

Disadvantages

Although WPReviewEngine does get the job done, there was one lack of a feature that really got to me, sub-category support. WFReview allows you to use data in your CSV to create subcategories, as well as parent categories.

Lastly, WPReviewEngine has a serious lack of documentation. One of the things I really like about WFReview are the support forums. If I have a problem or question I typically get it answered within 24 hours. WPReviewEngine on the other hand does not have a support forum as far as I know. The developer does offer his assistance directly, however. The support page reads:

I will provide assistance to those wishing to integrate WPReivewEngine with a custom WordPress theme using the API instead of the auto-embed feature, or those wishing to modify the internal WPReviewEngine code. I won’t write the code for you, but I’m happy to explain where things are, how they work, and what changes would be necessary to achieve the desired reult.

I haven’t personally requested support so I don’t know how good it is, but I imagine its good based on my minimal experiance thus far. Luckily WP Review Engine is easy to use, even for the Wordpress novice.

Demo: WPReviewEngine Demo | Local Directory Demo
Download: Single License – $79.95 USD | Unlimited License – $149.95

Use the coupon code ‘v2release’ to get 20% off for a limited time.