Support » Plugins » Random Rotating/Shuffling Testimonials Plugin?

  • I have a client with a WordPress 3.4.2 site that includes a Testimonials page that includes about 50 or 60 brief testimonials. Each one includes the quote from the customer, the customer’s name and title, then a company name. Each also includes a thumbnail image.

    My client is looking to have a very similar page, only he wants the order of the testimonials to rotate or “shuffle,” so that each time you load the page, the order of the quotes on the page is different. All the testimonials will be visible on the page every time you load it. Just the order will be different.

    I’m not looking for a sidebar widget, but rather something that will actually shuffle the testimonials on a full page.

    I’ve been looking through plugins and I haven’t found anything like this yet. Can anyone recommend something? Thanks in advance.

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  • If it were me, I would build a custom template for my theme for the testimonials page, then create the Testimonials page and set its template to your custom template. To make it easy, you can take a lot of the code from one of your existing pages (like single.php or page.php in the twenty-ten theme). The only part you’ll have to change is the part that displays the posts themselves.

    For the actual testimonials, there are a number of ways you could handle it. You could create a category called “Testimonials,” and then create a post for each of your existing testimonials, then set the query that retrieves the posts to randomly order them. To add new testimonials, all you’d have to do is add a post to the Testimonials category.

    Or, you could create a new table in your WordPress database, populate it with the data for your testimonials, then write the PHP in your custom template to retrieve them in random order and output the HTML to include the elements you listed above. To add a new testimonial, you’d have to upload the images to the server and create a new database entry for it. The script in your template would do the rest.

    If you don’t want to deal with the database, you could create individual HTML files for each testimonial, put them in a “testimonials” folder on your server with their correpsonding images, and write a bit of PHP to randomly select them and output the HTML in your custom template. To add new testimonials, you’d have to create new HTML files and upload them with the images to the folder on the server. The PHP script in your custom template would do the rest.

    Keep in mind that if you’re using a caching plugin to make your WordPress site load more quickly and reduce the load on the server, your testimonials won’t sort fresh each time the page loads, but when the cache expires.

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