How to implement review ratings with Fivestar?

Question

I want to build a rating functionality identical to what we can see on http://www.meineuni.de/ - there is a page of a product (or an University as in the example) and that page contains cumulative ratings taken from continuous ratings. A sample page is http://www.meineuni.de/uni/jacobs-university-bremen/bewertungen/

Business case: I want anonymous users to be able to create content of specific type and be able when creating the page, to assign ratings in several categories. This page will then be available online for other anonymous users to rate and the rating will be cumulated with the initial rating to show the weighted (initial+continuous) rating.

Is something like this possible with Fivestar in Drupal 7?

I want to find the right way from the beginning, instead of trial and error approach, which I don't mind, but that is more time consuming.

Answer 1

Yes, you can do it, you can combine the Views module with the Views Aggregator Plus or with the Views Calc module.

Views Calc:

Adds simple calculations to a views table. You can SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, MIN, MAX, or AVG selected columns. A plug in theme makes the view look more spreadsheet-like (right justifies numeric fields, shades calculated columns and rows, and underlines calculated rows).

Views Aggregator Plus:

In addition to what Views and Views Calc do, this module:

• enumerates group members
• produces tallies, i.e. textual histograms
• aggregates on Views PHP code-snippet evalutations
• can filter out result rows on regexp patterns
• gives you sorting on Views' Math expressions
• can process Webform submissions
• lets you add your own custom aggregation functions

... and it puts summary statistics at the bottom of your aggregated table as well!

Answer 2

The Views Calc module (of which I'm a legacy co-maintainer ...) as suggested in the previous answer is indeed something I'd also recommend to investigate. To get an idea of how it is like to use that module, have a look at my answer to "How can I show average votes of fivestar nodes?".

Below are some more options you may want to consider (as per the voting-api you used in your question), and which includes the Fivestar module.

Rating

The VotingAPI module offers a framework to developers of Drupal modules about voting and/or rating. It uses a standardized API and schema for storing, retrieving, and tabulating votes for Drupal content.

VotingAPI offers these key features:

• Create/Retrieve/Update/Delete operations for voting data.
• Whenever a vote is casted, it calculates the results and caches them. These calculations can either be the default calculations (average, total, etc), or they can be implemented via custom tallying functions.
• Via its integration with the Actions module, it can trigger workflow steps whenever votes are casted and results are tallied, such as promoting a node to the front page, hiding a comment flagged as spam, or sending some eMail.
• It integrates with the Views module, which allows for slice and dice of the content of a site based on user consensus. And tt provides functions to format vote data to display them to users.

Typical rating related modules with a stable release for D7:

• Rate.
• Fivestar.
• Voting API Bayesian.
• Star Rating (no VotingAPI dependency).
• Raty (D7-beta2).

Views / Rules / Flag / Message

Everything above relates to "Rating" (or voting). Some more modules that you may want to consider (= add to the mix of modules you might want to consider):

• The Flag module, which is typically combined with the Rules module also to create all sorts of interesting site features. If you're not familiar (enough/yet) with Rules, checkout the 32 (!!!) great, and free, video tutorials Learn the Rules framework, organized in 7 chapters. There is a similar set of 8 video tutorials about the Flag module.

• If you also add the Views module, you're already pretty close to a great mix of modules to create the site you're looking for. Maybe also review the set of 30 video tutorials about the Views module.

• For more details about the Message module, refer to some interesting Use Cases detailed within its Community Documentation.