Some Short Code Not Working for Me

@ziegel To use the text for relative dates, just omit the date parameter, otherwise it will attempt to use the PHP date format.

You have three main choices to alter the overall rating stars:

1. Either use the two star parameters:
   [reviews_rating stars="#FF0000" stars_gray="#CCCCCC"]
2. Or set the these stars to refer to the CSS:
   [reviews_rating stars="css" stars_gray="css"]
3. Or revert to the star HTML entity rather than the SVG – which can also be styled using CSS:
   [reviews_rating stars="html"]

You can amend the original post to include a URL highlighting the reviews that you see.

If there is still an issue, please can you share the Shortcodes that you’re using?

@ziegel Thanks for the detailed response.

I will investigate the disappearing date issue shortly. It is very likely related to the changes to the point at which the language loads, so I’ll endeavour to test this and issue a fix soon.

I will also look into improving the handling of these dates more generally as it has been some time since I’ve revisited this aspect of the code and its description in the Shortcodes section.

For the Shortcode parameters, they’re a little like CSV – so single numbers or words don’t need enclosure. If you add quotes around numbers, true, false, null, etc. that is also fine and it’s treated the same way. I avoid the quotes just to illustrate these values are different to text strings and lists. You can see this in action at the Demonstration website.

The overall review count is not referring to the reviews in your catalogue, rather the overall number of reviews stated by Google. This may be out by one or two if the update frequency is long and you regularly receive reviews. Check the Retrieved Data section for the information retrieved and compare this to the number you see with in Google and on your website (page caching may delay the updated count).

For a good guide on usage, please check out the Demonstration website – this will have plenty of examples of the Shortcode parameters and some supporting CSS.

@ziegel The screen shot is showing the expected review data – the retrieved date is empty because it was never retrieved through the Places API, rather it was set by you using the HTML Import process.

The submitted date does not contain a time because it only uses the date, set to the start of the day. With the HTML Import, it doesn’t contain enough information to accurately set the time, so this is ommitted. The actual data stored for this is used to present the relevant date string as it is not present within the HTML Import data. The submitted date always uses timestamps, so it can be formatted accordingly when presented in your website.

With the second point, have you remembered to set the styling in CSS? If not, then it will apply the default yellow/orange colour as you’ve shown here.

I will use the example on the Demonstration website to offer you a starting point for your CSS:

.google-business-reviews-rating .rating,
.google-business-reviews-rating .rating .star {
    color: rgba(255, 20, 20, 0.9);
}
.google-business-reviews-rating .rating .star.gray {
    color: rgba(165, 100, 100, 0.4);
}

This will mirror the colours in the final example.

If it helps resolve this, I can assist more easily if you can share the URL and the current Shortcode used to present it. This way I can inspect the CSS and perform a test using the same data and Place ID locally. You can share this directly using the support link and submitting your details through the form.