Is WordPress appropriate for building a review site?

  • arass

    (@arass)


    18 years, 9 months ago

    Hi all, I would like to set up a site where my friends and I can post reviews of books we have read. Amazon etc. already have this obviously, but I think it would be fun on a smaller scale where people mostly know each other. Ideally any member would be able to enter a book title and write a short review while giving the book a numerical rating. Then others would be able to also post their reviews and ratings. I know it sounds like a bulletin board, but I would really like to be able to display the reviews sorted by author or rating rather than in the order they are posted. It would also be awesome if I could calculate the average rating each book received and sort books based on rating or number of reviews.

    A friend suggested that WordPress might be able to do this sort of thing. Another possibility is that I really need to start with BBS software and work from there (I see you guys run on BBpress and used to use miniBB). Can anyone give any advice about what software might make a good framework for building a website like this?

    Thanks a lot!
    Andrew

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
  • ian2

    (@ian2)

    18 years, 9 months ago

    It’s really up to your personal preference, but WordPress is a great content management system for stuff like this. I use WordPress for my web hosting company site, because of the page feature. My friend at http://www.thelanguageartist.com/ uses WordPress for her business. If you want something that is simple to use .. I would use WP

    Dgold

    (@dgold)

    18 years, 9 months ago

    This review site I found is actually on MT but you could make about the same thing on WordPress for free (and I’m planning to get ideas from parts of their design, myself, for a CD review site) —
    http://www.gloriousnoise.com/
    ^^Not my site, just one I like the functionality of it

    Thread Starter arass

    (@arass)

    18 years, 9 months ago

    Thanks for the advice! One more question, I am betraying my ignoreance here, I have done a lot of progaming in C++ matlab and sas but very little web based stuff.

    I presume that wordpress is basicly a pretty way to display information in a database. Can I also use it to display the data in a table format? In this case a table of links to Books, each of which has a table of links to reviews?

    thanks!

    Joshua Sigar

    (@alphaoide)

    18 years, 9 months ago

    Can I also use it to display the data in a table format?
    You have to know how to code table in HTML, and maybe some CSS.

    Ming

    (@ming)

    18 years, 9 months ago

    Don’t forget to check out http://structuredblogging.org/wordpress/?page_id=8

    It’s a plugin that adds an admin template designed for review sites.

    Thread Starter arass

    (@arass)

    18 years, 9 months ago

    Thanks Ming, the structured blooging plugin seems like a great place to start!

    ifelse

    (@ifelse)

    18 years, 9 months ago

    “I presume that wordpress is basicly a pretty way to display information in a database.”
    Only if you would call Microsoft Word a pretty way of displaying characters…

    Thread Starter arass

    (@arass)

    18 years, 9 months ago

    Sorry ifelse, I did not mean to sound dismissive, I was just trying to figure out how the software works to get an idea of how it can be modified.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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