Book Reviews in a Forum

Book Reviews in a Forum

by Suneel Madahar -
Number of replies: 6

Hi All

A colleague of mine would like a forum to be set up with the following reqiurements:

  • Each student could have their own thread
  • The student would mention a book that they love
  • All other students could then comment on that book
  • All students could leave a vote for that book which would who up at the top of the thread. 
The idea is that you would end up with a number of book titles that would then have a star rating associated with it. She wanted it to be a little like the amazon reviews, where you could leave your thoughts and ratings. 
Currently you can have threads, with no ratings. You can only leave ratings on Q&A forums which are not suitable for this. 
Is there any way to achieve this? 
Thanks in advance to all!
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Suneel Madahar

Re: Book Reviews in a Forum

by Itamar Tzadok -

The database module is as good a candidate as the forum, if not better, for such application. Entries can be rated and commented, comments cannot be rated (in the forum all posts can be rated including those who are supposed to be merely comments). Afaict, neither the database nor the forum can sort the entries by ratings though. smile

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In reply to Itamar Tzadok

Re: Book Reviews in a Forum

by Suneel Madahar -

Thanks to all the advice so far. I will investigate the Database module, which I have never yet tried. 

I followed Mary's advice, and allowed forum posts to be rated. The problem I have now is that you can only rate other peoples posts and not your own! 

My colleague needs you to be able to leave a rating for inside your OWN comment, as the ratings are not being used to rate the comment itself, but in fact to leave a score rating for a book that has been mentioned.

So for example, I would suggest the book Harry Potter and leave a rating for this book of 5. The next person would leave their comment, and put their own rating in there. Over time, you would have a number of comments per book, each with a rating left by the comment author. 

I will continue to investigate this matter!

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Suneel Madahar

Re: Book Reviews in a Forum

by Itamar Tzadok -

My colleague needs you to be able to leave a rating for inside your OWN comment, as the ratings are not being used to rate the comment itself, but in fact to leave a score rating for a book that has been mentioned.

Rating the book should be done on the entry/post that introduces the book and you can then view the list of ratings and raters from a link that is automatically added to the entry/post. This also allows for displaying an aggregate (e.g. highest, average). It is true that it would be nice to have the rating and the raters' comment in the same place, as your colleague envisions it, but this may not be easy to implement given the current implementations of the rating and comment components. I will investigate whether it may implemented as a dataform view but it may take some time until I get to that. smile

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In reply to Suneel Madahar

Re: Book Reviews in a Forum

by Randy Orwin -

Another option is the Glossary module. It has ratings and comments and tied in with the Random Glossary Entry block you can do some really neat things on your course home page.

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In reply to Randy Orwin

Re: Book Reviews in a Forum

by Itamar Tzadok -

The dataform module has ratings and comments and interval (including random) view and fancybox (gallery) view and tied in with the Dataform view block you can do some amazingly neat things on your course home page. big grin

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